Abstract

This paper asks a structural question: what is the disciplinary relation between philosophy and metaphilosophy? Rather than treating “discipline” as a vague sociological label, it uses a conceptual-engineering methodology to design a precise framework for disciplinarity. It argues that existing accounts (Heckhausen 1972; Kuhn 1996; Turner 2000) each satisfy some but not all of five key desiderata: conceptual autonomy, external compatibility, descriptiveness, categorization ability, and explanatory power. It then proposes a set-theoretic model that distinguishes internal (fields, methods, results) and external (institutions, users, communication devices) disciplinary structures and defines sub-disciplines via subset relations over internal structures. Applied to contemporary academic philosophy, this framework shows that metaphilosophy is a discipline whose fields and results are proper subsets of philosophy’s, while its classification as a sub-discipline or an independent discipline turns on how broadly we construe “philosophical” methods.