Postmodern Nonsense? And my theory of the jargon goldilocks

Speaking of someone who leads postmodernism reading groups for fun, this was not. It triggered a discussion amongst some outside colleagues about the use of discipline specific terminology (jargon) to signal in-group status to readers.

On the goldilocks zone for jargon:
– If I were to write an academic paper in simple English, such that it could be understood by a five year old, I would not be taken seriously as an academic, even if the semantic content was otherwise valid and novel.
– On the other hand, If I were to write an academic paper in jargon so cryptic that it was unintelligible, it would not be taken seriously regardless of my semantic intent, because no one could understand it.
– I propose that there is a sweet spot for jargon (the goldilocks zone) that is necessary to prove to your peers that you’re one of them, accepting of their norms and prior work, yet understandable enough by a wide enough breadth of disciplines to be cited and circulated.

On the actual content:
I essentially agree with what I understood to be the argument: there is a difference between the object, experiment, or ~thing~ being measured (first cut), and the observation, measurement, outcome, or interpretation (second cut).

What I failed to understand is how this differs from common critiques of positivist empirical epistemological paradigms, which argue that there is no direct experience of reality (roughly, “first cut”), because we always must interpret meaning onto our experience of the world (roughly, “second cut”). If this was the argument, however, it would have been nice to say that more plainly. Perhaps there was more there I missed, in which case it would have been since to say so more plainly.