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Many thanks for this inquiry, and related posted thoughts. It has already led to some serious conversation, as per comments likely to appear shortly in Science Education: Some New Directions? In the meanwhile, some quick thoughts of my own ...

There are, I think, two related but distinct questions here that are worth pulling apart a bit. One is the issue of science versus humanities, the "empirical" versus the "representational", the contemporary versus the historical. My suspicion is that there is exactly much less difference here than we frequently suspect based on our disciplinary training. I'm inclined to think of science as story telling and story revising (see also What IS Science?), ie that the historical and representational are more important to science education (and science itself) than is often recognized. Conversely, I'm inclined to think of the humanities as having much more of an empirical foundation than one think. Making observations and telling and revising stories about them seem to me a common feature of both science and the humanities, if one accepts that "observations" may be made either on things that are not made by humans or things that are (or both). See Science as Story Telling and Story Revising: A Discussion of Its Relevance to History and Story Telling in (At Least) Three Dimensions: An Exploration of Teaching Reading, Writing, and Beyond for more along these lines. It requires a bit of a mind stretch for many scientists to see/teach the historical and representation aspects of science and probably a somewhat different mind shift for many humanists to see the empirical aspects of the humanities but I think the similar overall pattern can indeed be productively used in teaching in both realms.

The other issue is "how does one bring students to the point where they might have a question"? Here too it seems to me there is much more commonality between science and the humanities than we often think. Let me assure you it is not at all only 18th century literary scholars who have to wrestle with the question you pose. Many teachers of biology, chemistry, physics, and so on do so as well. And frequently deal with it (as do many humanists?) by saying something along the lines of "learn this" and you'll get to (or see that there are) really interesting questions.

I'm myself inclined in the case of science to a different approach. After all, science originates in questions that everyone has and is familiar with (who am I? where did I come from? how to I relate to the world? what can I do to contribute? and the like). These aren't of course "answerable" questions, but they are ones that everybody can ask, that everybody has tentative answers to, and that one can become more sophisticated at both asking and answering by becoming more familiar with science.

My guess, of course, is that one can do exactly the same trick with the humanities. All it takes is, again, a little mind stretch to recall the "big questions" that got one interested in the first place in whatever subject one is teaching about, a willingness to start there (where the students are), and the courage to allow students to see, as is in fact the case, that one is an "authority" not in the sense of having answers but only in the sense of having more experiences with/thought more about some area of exploration than they have.

Curious of course to hear to what extent these thoughts continue to seem relevant to teaching 18th century literature and in what ways your own thoughts/experiences can help shape my teaching of science.