Is it possible to inspect a function/method to see whether it can be used as a decorator? In that it follows the usual way decorators wrap other functions and return a callable? Specifically, I'm looking to validate 3rd party code.
By applying a suspected decorator, catching exceptions, and then testing whether the result contains a __call__ method, you could produce a guess as to whether a given callable is a decorator or not. But it will be only a guess, not a guarantee.
Beyond that, I do not believe what you want will be possible in general, due to the dynamically typed nature of the Python language and to the special treatment of built-in functions in the CPython interpreter. It is not possible to programmatically tell whether a callable will accept another callable as an argument, or what type its return value will have. Also, in CPython, for functions implemented in C, you cannot even inspect a callable to see how many arguments it accepts.
The word "decorator" can be taken to mean different things. One way to define it is, a decorator is any callable that accepts a single (callable) argument and returns a callable.
Note that I have not even used the word "function" in this definition; it would actually be incorrect to do so. Indeed, some commonly used decorators have strange properties:
classmethod and staticmethod decorators return descriptor objects, not functions.__init__(self, somecallable) method and a __call__(self, *args, **kwargs) method can be used as a decorator.