Instrumental and Expressive Emotional Appeals in Sociotechnical Systems: Post-Platonic Framing as a Governance Indicator

Emotional appeals play a central role in modern sociotechnical systems, influencing policy formation, institutional behavior, and large-scale coordination. This paper proposes that emotional appeals in such systems tend to bifurcate into two functional classes: expressive appeals, which seek situational acknowledgment or relief, and instrumental appeals, which generate transferable obligations, precedents, or enforcement capacity. We argue that post-Platonic framing, the abstraction of concrete experience into universalized moral categories, functions as an operationally useful indicator of when emotional expression is being converted into governance leverage rather than remaining localized and situational. This work makes no claims about moral validity, speaker intent, or truth; it is concerned solely with systemic behavior and institutional response patterns. The proposed framework aims to assist researchers and practitioners in identifying norm-generating affective signals in large-scale human-facing systems.