When What We Take for Granted Must Be Examined

Husserl, Dagfinn Føllesdal, and the Art of Justifying Help

The woman sits at the kitchen table with the breadboard in front of her. The professional has read the case note before the visit: “She declines help.” Now she asks whether the woman has given any more thought to the offer of help with breakfast.

“I haven’t said I want to manage everything on my own,” the woman replies. “I just want to make my own sandwiches.”

The professional looks down at the note. The words are not exactly untrue. Yet they have led her to expect something different from what the woman is now saying.

Good help requires us to justify what we do, but also to let experience change the basis of our justifications. Through his reading of Edmund Husserl, Dagfinn Føllesdal (1932–2026) offers an important starting point: we always understand against a background of things we already take for granted. Responsibility begins not with discarding all such assumptions, but with recognising when they no longer hold.

A Husserl Open to Discussion

Dagfinn Føllesdal was one of the Norwegian philosophers who made Husserl a partner in philosophical dialogue far beyond phenomenology’s own circles. He worked in both Oslo and Stanford and had studied under the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine. Yet his interest in Husserl was not a later addition to an already established analytic philosophy. It was an early and enduring part of his philosophical work.

Føllesdal read Husserl with questions about meaning, experience, and justification in mind. What enables us to direct ourselves towards something? How can experience support a belief? What happens when what we encounter does not match what we expected?

For Føllesdal, philosophical clarity becomes a way of taking experience seriously. A concept must be open to explanation, an interpretation must be supported, and a disagreement must be open to examination. Husserl need not be made obscure to be profound.

This attitude has practical significance at the kitchen table. Here, too, we must be able to ask what a description means, what it rests on, and what might show that it needs to change.

The Same Table, Different Meanings

Husserl’s conception of intentionality holds that consciousness is directed towards something. We see a cup, remember a person, or fear a fall. But whatever we direct ourselves towards always appears in a particular way and with a particular meaning.

Føllesdal’s interpretation draws on a distinction made by Gottlob Frege. Frege’s familiar example is the morning star and the evening star. Both names refer to Venus, but the planet is given in different ways. We may know it under one name without knowing that the other refers to the same planet. Frege therefore distinguishes between reference, what an expression refers to, and Sinn, the way it is given.

In his article “Husserl’s Notion of Noema,” Føllesdal interprets Husserl’s noema as a generalisation of this concept of meaning from linguistic expressions to acts of consciousness. The noema is not an inner image we contemplate instead of the world. It is the meaning-content that enables consciousness to be directed towards something. The interpretation is contested, but it makes the connection between meaning and a shared world clear.

The professional and the woman are both talking about breakfast. For the professional, it appears in terms of nutrition, functioning, and safety. For the woman, it is also an activity she can still manage, a familiar rhythm, and an opportunity to do something without waiting for others. Frege’s example offers a way into this difference: there is one breakfast, appearing as a situation of risk and as an experience of competence. The analogy does not explain the entire complexity of the situation, but it shows why different meanings can concern the same thing.

These meanings are not two closed, private worlds. They concern the same breakfast and can be examined in the encounter between the two women. The woman’s experience of the meal as important to her independence does not remove the risk of falling. Nor does documenting that risk exhaust what breakfast is in her life.

Føllesdal’s reading helps us hold on to both points: we encounter the world through meaning, and meaning does not exempt us from examining the matter itself.

The Expectations That Come with Experience

When the woman lifts her cup, she expects the handle to hold. When she reaches for the bread, she counts on the table being where it was before. She does not first need to formulate these expectations. They accompany the action.

For Husserl, experience is surrounded by a horizon: more than what is currently visible or explicitly thought. The cup has a side she cannot see. The kitchen continues behind her back. Her next movement has an anticipated direction. This background makes it possible to act without continually starting afresh.

The horizon connects each particular experience to a world we already count on. Føllesdal finds a connection here to the concept of the lifeworld. In “The Lebenswelt in Husserl,” he refers to the lectures Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie from 1910–11: the problem is present long before The Crisis, even though the terminology and its articulation develop. The lifeworld thus continues Husserl’s earlier questions rather than marking a late break with them.

Føllesdal also emphasises that the world is constituted through the body and action. It becomes meaningful through what we can do in it, not only through what we observe. When the woman makes her sandwiches, she therefore expresses more than a preference. She sustains a practical connection between her body, the things around her, and the rhythm of the day. Taking over the activity may change part of the world in which she feels at home.

The professional, too, arrives with a horizon of expectations. The case note has made some of them particularly likely: the woman will probably refuse again. The conversation may be difficult. It may be necessary to explain the risks more clearly.

Such expectations are necessary when preparing for a visit. But they can also make the professional less receptive to what is actually said. If all the woman’s answers sound like variations on an already familiar refusal, the expectation never encounters resistance.

A Starting Point That Can Change

Neither of them can examine everything at once. The professional must trust much of her education, parts of the case record, and knowledge about health and care. The woman must trust her experience of her body, her home, and the service. The conversation begins in the midst of all this.

In Føllesdal’s work on Husserl, the relationship between this background and justification is central. What we already take for granted makes inquiry possible. But that does not place it beyond inquiry.

When something fails, we must look more closely. The cup may have developed a crack. The body may have lost strength. The case note may have simplified a conversation so much that it misleads the next reader.

This connects with Quine’s idea that our beliefs form an interconnected web. A new experience does not always tell us unambiguously which belief must change. We have to examine the connections. This does not mean that Husserl and Quine share the same philosophy. Føllesdal’s work nevertheless makes a conversation between them possible.

At the table, it may not be the woman’s understanding of her need for help that first requires correction. It may be the professional’s assumption about what she previously declined.

“When you say you want to make your own sandwiches,” the professional asks, “what would you like help with?”

The question opens up a distinction the case note had closed off.

Knowledge, Too, Has Become Part of Everyday Life

For Husserl, sedimentation describes how earlier formations of meaning settle and become available without our having to enact them anew. The concept helps us understand why the lifeworld is not an untouched realm of experience outside history.

Føllesdal’s reading challenges the idea that science only distances us from the lifeworld. Scientific knowledge can itself become part of what we gradually come to take for granted. History also leaves its mark on the assumptions of everyday life.

The woman may know that she should eat regularly because of her medication. She uses an assistive device provided by the health service. The professional knows the value of familiar routines and meaningful activities. At the table, scientific knowledge and lived experience are already interwoven.

The case note shows a similar movement in miniature. An earlier conversation has left behind an assessment: “She declines help.” The next reader takes over the result without having participated in the conversation. The assessment becomes a taken-for-granted background to a new encounter. In this way, we can use sedimentation to describe something quite concrete in the service’s everyday practice.

We need to be able to build on earlier assessments. The problem arises when the connection to the experience behind them becomes inaccessible, or when new experiences are not allowed to change them. The question, then, is how knowledge is used. A risk assessment can reveal something the woman herself has underestimated. It can also be applied so crudely that everything she does on her own appears to be a problem.

Husserl’s criticism of scientific idealisation retains its force: a model must not be confused with the whole of reality. With Føllesdal, we can also emphasise that a well-justified model can correct our everyday assumptions. The lifeworld gives science meaning, but it does not shield us from learning from it.

To Justify Is to Be Able to Answer

The woman explains that the most difficult part is fetching things from the kitchen counter. Once the food is on the table, she usually manages well.

The professional suggests setting out bread, toppings, and a drink before the woman begins. But the woman also wants to fetch her own coffee. Their disagreement now becomes clearer. She recently lost her balance while returning from the counter with a hot cup in her hand.

“I know I can fall,” the woman says. “But if you’re going to do everything that might make me fall, what will be left for me to do?”

Taking the woman’s lifeworld seriously does not mean that the professional should remain silent. She must be able to explain why this particular part of the morning routine concerns her. At the same time, she must be able to answer the woman’s question about what is lost if help takes over the whole of breakfast.

The conversation requires a distinction between what they know and what they judge. How unsteady is the woman? That requires knowledge of the situation. How much risk should she be able to live with in order to preserve an important activity? That is also an ethical question. A measurement can inform the judgement without determining it on its own.

Føllesdal connects justification with what John Rawls calls reflective equilibrium: general principles and considered judgements about particular cases are tested against one another, and both may need adjustment. At the table, the principle of preventing harm meets the judgement that the woman should be able to continue making her own sandwiches. The professional must refine what prevention should require, while the woman must consider whether someone else can fetch the coffee without her thereby losing the whole of breakfast. Safety and independence acquire a more precise meaning through this process. But coherence between their judgements does not amount to a sound justification if it is achieved by excluding the woman’s experience.

In a 2020 interview with Øystein Linnebo and Einar Duenger Bøhn in Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift, Føllesdal explains why reflective equilibrium must be connected with empathy. Our beliefs are shaped by the environments we come from. They may be internally coherent and still leave us unreceptive to how others are affected. We must therefore practise understanding what measures mean for those who have to live with them. In this way, Husserl’s concern with the experience of others becomes part of Føllesdal’s own ethical thinking.

“It is safest” is therefore the beginning of a justification. The professional must then be able to explain what she wants to protect, what the measure costs the woman, and whether a less intrusive solution is possible.

Back at the Table

They agree to try an arrangement in which the care worker sets out the food and pours the coffee, while the woman makes her own sandwiches. After a week, they will examine how it is working. The woman still believes she can fetch the coffee. The professional still does not share that judgement.

In the case record, she writes what the woman wants to do herself, what the concern is, and what they have agreed to try. She also records that they remain in disagreement about the coffee.

This note, too, will become sedimented: it is intended to become something the next care worker can build on. The difference is that it preserves traces of the reasoning and the disagreement. Whoever comes next will learn both what has been assessed and what still needs to be examined.

A week later, the breadboard is on the table again. Perhaps the arrangement has worked. Perhaps something unexpected has happened. Then both the agreement and its justification must be open to reconsideration.

We need a world we can trust in order to act. But good judgement also shows itself in the ability to recognise when what we trusted must be understood differently.