"Science is dead. We have killed it, you and I" How Attacking the Presuppositional Structures of Our Scientific Age Can Doom the Interrogation of Nature IAN WINCHESTER Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ta]ST~Cr: This paper is an attempt to characterize what 20 years of teaching history and philosophy of science to science teachers have suggested to me. The most important thing which I have found is that almost all of my students have the same standard pic- ture of science. Karl Pearson's The Grammar of Science gives the main outlines of this picture. This view emphasizes the centrality of method over particular results and the purely empirical nature of observation and of generalization derived from empirical induction. My paper shows that in giving modem history and philosophy of science to a generation of students, I have sown the seeds of scepticism and disbelief in a fashion par- allel to that in which the introduction of science as a sceptical method vis-?t-vis theology undermined the belief in God. Thus I suggest that a danger we may be as yet unaware of is that science as an enterprise can be undermined and so lost, unless we guard against a too facile scepticism - - a scepticism quite different from a healthy "wait and see" or a "show me the colour of your argument." KBVWOgDS: philosophy of science, Pearson, scepticism, scientific age, death of science Let me first sketch the background. I teach at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. I began teaching there 20 years ago, teaching philosophy of science to science teachers doing graduate degrees (Masters of Arts, Masters of Educa- tion, and Doctors of Philosophy; some time later a Doctor of Education degree was added). My initial group of students, 20 or so, were mainly from the Cur- riculum and Psychology departments in the Institute and all were school teach- ers, mainly secondary school teachers. Two or three of them had just completed undergraduate degrees in philosophy and wished to do further philosophical work. I was recently graduated from Oxford where I had done a Bachelor of Philosophy in philosophy of science, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of mind, and a Doctor of Philosophy in which I had tackled a number of problems surrounding the scientific status of quantitative social history. I imagined my task as a teacher was to put my students at the immediate brink of research in Interchange, Vol. 24/1&2, 191-198, 1993. 9 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. "19"1