Internal coherence of a text and its coherence with other texts is a question of (neuro)semiotics and linguistics/philosophy of language, both of which, in my mind, are branches of cognitive science. If there is something else that makes texts convincing to people apart from their coherence, apart from external factors such as the likability and the authority of the author of the text or the orator, then the “quality” of philosophical texts also becomes the question of neuropsychology more generally.
Before the invention of logic, someone might have said the same thing about math, that nothing determines the “quality” of a proof, aside from how convincing human neuropsychology happens to find it. I’m not saying that for sure philosophy is the same or analogous, that we’ll definitely find deeper reasons than neuropsychology for why a philosophical text is correct or convincing, but neither do I know how to rule that out, which makes me uncertain.
Plus, intuitively it seems like when trying to answer philosophical questions, I’m often aiming for some truth more “real” or “objective” than merely coherence with scientific models and arbitrarily selected other texts. For example, it seems either objectively true or objectively false that nothing determines the quality of a philosophical text aside from coherence and neuropsychology. The truth value of this statement doesn’t seem to depend on what other texts I happen to select to try to make it cohere with, or other subjective factors.
Before the invention of logic, someone might have said the same thing about math, that nothing determines the “quality” of a proof, aside from how convincing human neuropsychology happens to find it. I’m not saying that for sure philosophy is the same or analogous, that we’ll definitely find deeper reasons than neuropsychology for why a philosophical text is correct or convincing, but neither do I know how to rule that out, which makes me uncertain.
Plus, intuitively it seems like when trying to answer philosophical questions, I’m often aiming for some truth more “real” or “objective” than merely coherence with scientific models and arbitrarily selected other texts. For example, it seems either objectively true or objectively false that nothing determines the quality of a philosophical text aside from coherence and neuropsychology. The truth value of this statement doesn’t seem to depend on what other texts I happen to select to try to make it cohere with, or other subjective factors.