Fun essay. By strange coincidence, it overlaps with the discussion from my 514 class yesterday of Strawson’s essay “Ethical Intuitionism”. Strawson says on the last page “His [the philosopher’s] task is not to supply a new set of tools to describe what it is that is communicated and shared, and how the tools are used to do the work.” It’s not a project of analysis, nor one of translation, nor one of justification, but one of articulation – of our moral discourse and practice. So I guess this overlaps substantially with the position you describe thus: “(a) philosophy is, in the end, about “our procedures and practices regarding O””.

I have two points to make about this, one bearing on your general topic, the other on a particular claim you make. Second point first. You say that: “Understanding O will involve extremely difficult empirical questions about “our procedures and practices regarding O”. (For example, what are those practices? What principles, if any, are guiding them? And so on.)

But it is not clear to me that philosophy of this sort is best characterized as straightforwardly empirical. It is true that it strives to be entirely internal to the practice; but as the practice itself is characterized throughout by large patches of normativity – this is true of our moral practice, our epistemic practice, and even our practice of identifying and tracking objects through time – then internal to those practices is the possibility of deviance. So figuring out, on this view of philosophy, what our practices of praise and blame are, or our practices of doxastic responsibility, really can’t just be matter of empirical work – such figuring is guided by the normativity in the practices, and oriented to (figuring out) that normativity. So when someone like Strawson describes our “reactive attitudes,” such as resentment (in Freedom and Resentment) it doesn’t seem like it is, or needs to be, “merely” sociology.

But more importantly, I think it would be fair to such approaches to philosophy to hold that while they are about “our procedures and practices regarding O” in one way, what they are “about” in a deeper sense is us – self understanding is the end of such philosophy.

Now this overlaps considerably with what I take to an answer of long standing to the question “what is philosophy about,” an answer that is at least potentially deeply pluralistic methodologically. Hence many different answers could be forthcoming to the question of what counts as evidence from people who are still engaged in something recognizably philosophical. This is my first point (i.e., the one I’m making second): I don’t subscribe methodologically to the picture of philosophy I described above (and probably its practitioners would do a better job describing it) although I do think I would give more weight to our practice in some areas than you would – the metaphysics of objects for example. But I have no problem with saying that folks who do this are doing philosophy. In other words, I’m skeptical of the claim that the answer to the question “What is philosophy about?” must go through the question “What counts as evidence in philosophy?”