Evidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process that cannot be illuminated by appealing to the semantics of the modifier evidence-based. The complexity lies in the nature of evidence as a basic concept that circulates in both expert and non-expert spheres of communication, supports different interpretations in different contexts, and is inherently open to contestation. We outline a new methodology that combines a social epistemological perspective with advanced methods of corpus linguistics and elements of conceptual history to investigate this and other basic concepts that underpin the practice and ethos of modern medicine. The potential of this methodology to offer new insights into controversies such as those surrounding EBM is demonstrated through a case study of the various meanings supported by evidence and based, as attested in a large electronic corpus of online material written by non-experts as well as a variety of experts in different fields, including medicine.

循证医学一直是医学领域内外争议的主题，其批评者将其描述为还原论和威权主义，而其支持者则拒绝将其描述为对实际实践的讽刺。这场争论的核心是一个复杂的语言和社会过程，无法通过诉诸基于证据的修饰语的语义来阐明。复杂性在于证据的性质作为一个在专家和非专家交流领域流传的基本概念，支持在不同背景下的不同解释，并且天生就有争议。我们概述了一种新的方法论，它将社会认识论的观点与语料库语言学的先进方法和概念历史的元素相结合，以研究这个和其他支撑现代医学实践和精神的基本概念。这种方法对诸如围绕 EBM 的争议提供新见解的潜力通过对证据支持的各种含义的案例研究和基于，正如由非专家以及包括医学在内的不同领域的各种专家编写的大型在线材料电子语料库所证明的那样。