The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "evidence" takes a remark of A.J. Ayer's as an epigraph: "For my own part, I think that if one were looking for a single phrase to capture the stage to which philosophy has progressed, ‘the study of evidence’ would be a better choice than ‘the study of language’."

We might say that modern poetics is likewise the study of fabrication. "Il miglior fabbro" and all that.