 The distinction between the factual and the normative would become the cornerstone of Windelband’s “philosophy of values”. In his early writings, however, Windelband does not yet embrace this distinction. In his habilitation thesis Über die Gewißheit der Erkenntnis (1873), he argues that logic is a normative discipline, but that it needs to be put on a psychological basis. This is because the justification of our knowledge claims is always dependent on and relative to specific epistemic purposes which, in turn, are given psychologically. Although he criticizes the identification of the conditions of knowledge with psychophysical processes, he does think of psychology and logic or epistemology as continuous with one another. His 1875 “Die Erkenntnislehre unter dem völkerpsychologischen Gesichtspunkte” [“The theory of knowledge from the perspective of folk-psychology”] which was published in Moritz Lazarus’ and Heyman Steinthal’s Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft [Journal of folk psychology and linguistics], is more radical. It denies that logical norms are independent of the conscious mind and claims that the origins of logical norms are to be found in the social history of humankind: the principle of contradiction emerges in situations of social conflict together with the distinction between true and false beliefs; and the law of sufficient reason comes into being when conflicts between rival views are no longer settled by brute force. On this picture, logical principles exist only when humans cognize them. There is no boundary between psychological acts and objective logical laws, or between actual historical acceptance and normative validity.