EPISTEMOLOGY grounds’, Wittgenstein said, ‘justifying the evidence, comes to an end; but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e it is not a kind of seeing in our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game.’ (OC 204) Epistemology in the twentieth century went through parallel stages of development in different climates of thought In each case from an initial concentration on the individual consciousness epistemologists moved towards an appreciation of the role of social communities in the build-up of the web of belief Likewise, they moved from a concentration on the purely cognitive aspect of experience to an emphasis on its affective and practical element This development took place both within different schools of philosophy (Continental and analytic) and also within the thought of individual philosophers such as Husserl and Wittgenstein In each case the development brought enrichment to a field of philosophy that had initially been cramped by excessive individualism 168