Exploratory projection pursuit for ordered categorical (ordinal) items. Monotone category scores and a projection direction are estimated jointly by maximizing a weighted characteristic-function discrepancy between the projected joint distribution and the projection implied by item independence with the observed marginal distributions. Fitted category dictionaries and loadings can be frozen and evaluated on held-out data, with a finite-sample-valid held-out permutation test, a refitted permutation test, a variance/shape decomposition of the index and bootstrap stability summaries.