Maybe this postmodernist word salad phenomenon is the result of humanities students and professors (mistakenly) thinking that their area of study contains no more legitimate things to investigate.
Consequently, we're now seeing this mere intellect signaling being passed off as worthwhile content. Come on. You can do better.
For me, the reason I did it was simple: if you want good grades/academic-approval in this field... writing like that works!
I do think there is signaling going on--if your paper has the 'gestalt' of what a 'good paper' looks like, then you get an A. Because you 'get it'.
Similar signaling happens in all fields though, including software. For instance, when you're looking at a coder's website/github/resume, there are certain things hiring committees look for before passing on to the next level of the hiring process.
It's the same thing, I think. But the ultimate cause is most likely laziness. We use gestalt evaluation as a way to make quick judgments about whether a person understands our field. If they do--that means we don't have to read/evaluate that closely, and it's less effort for us.
Like all behaviors that are reinforced, there is motivation to encourage from both sides. Everyone wins on the deal.
Except those who are new to the field, yet still have worthwhile contributions. They are shut out.
Removing this bullshit signaling and standards is what we've been trying to do in academics for decades, to allow even children from lower class families to actively contribute without any disadvantage to their peers.
Yet, now you're saying that this signaling is a "win-win situation"?
Those new to the field would not appreciate why something is immutable and monadic, they are shut out. (Doesn't mean they can't churn out a simple form in VB).
It's not reasonable to hold everyone hostage to the least common denominator. That only foster mediocrity. Thankfully computer science has not suffered much from this, and I don't think social sciences should be held back either.
If you publish an algorithm in a paper, it's acceptable to do it in any language, pseudocode, as flowchart, structogram, etc.
I've seen papers describing algorithms in Scheme, Haskell, but also in python before.
Similarly there's no reason to expect a random person off the street to understand the language of a modern philosophical book.
Each field of study (social sciences and computer sciences) has its own domain specific language and concepts that requires some work to get your head around.
Maybe you should write a paper :)