ABSTRACT
The training of observers and the setting up of experimental situations as contexts of the observation are largely insulating devices. Special instruments may be employed, like one-way windows, or the intent if not the fact of observation may in other ways be concealed from human subjects. Boundary experiments are explicitly associated with some set of laws and consist of fact-finding inquiries designed to fix the range of application of the laws, particularly with regard to extreme conditions. In behavioral science such experiments are exemplified by studies of sleeplessness, sensory deprivation, perceptual thresholds, and the like. Simulation experiments are experiments on a model: they are designed to learn what will happen under certain “real” conditions related in a definite way to the experimental ones. A wind tunnel, for instance, is an apparatus for simulation experiments, and quite a comparable function is performed by college aptitude tests.
