supermetaphor

English

Etymology

super- +‎ metaphor

Noun

supermetaphor (plural supermetaphors)

1. A grounding fact; a correspondance between the underlying truth and our ideas and constructions based on that truth.
   • 1997, Archis - Issues 9-12, page 27:

     In this way he promotes landscape into a supermetaphor, in order to expose a general tendency towards equalization.

   • 2002, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation, →ISBN:

     Each legal order stands on a grounding fact, a superfact or a supermetaphor, as I would call it, which determines the specific interpretive standpoint or perspective that characterizes the adopted type of projection.

   • 2013, Hans-Georg Geissler, Stephen W. Link, James T. Townsend, Cognition, Information Processing, and Psychophysics: Basic Issues, →ISBN:

     In a way, what Fechner tried to do through his inner psychophysics of intensity was to subvert a set of tenacious metaphors—a kind of "Supermetaphor," governing psychophysiological thinking, that has channeled the thinking of so very many scientists before and after him. Broadly speaking, the Supermetaphor seeks equivalences in kind between physical and mental processes, as it postulates a strict quantitative as well as qualitative invariance between the structure of mental acts and the underlying physiological activities...... The Supermetaphor is implicit in attempts by modern scientists to find neural responses that match, quanitatively, some measure of sensation magnitutdes. And it is implicit in Freud.

2. An overarching metaphor; a metaphor that encompasses several sub-metaphors.
   • 1996, Masters Abstracts - Volume 34, Issues 3-4, page 1375:

     The third chapter focuses on the theme of alcohol, which is a sort of "supermetaphor" of poetic distillation, encompassing all the other metaphors.

   • 1998, Aldo D. Scaglione, Paolo Cherchi, Essays on the Arts of Discourse: Linguistics, Rhetoric, Poetics, →ISBN:

     This is a case of supermetaphor called metalepsis by Quintilian and transumptio by Geoffrey of Vinsauf. The images echo one another.

   • 1998, Shaun Gallagher, The Inordinance of Time, →ISBN, page 107:

     ...one supermetaphor. Perhaps we could steal a phrase from Merleau-Ponty and suggest that there are no principal and subordinate metaphors: all metaphors are concentric, like the concentricity of flesh, a metaphor for which there are no names in traditional philosophy.

   • 2003, Max Velmans, The Science of Consciousness, →ISBN, page 81:

     We can combine all five metaphors into a single integrated supermetaphor. The theatre can be visualized as including useful aspects of the threshold, searchlight, iceberg, novelty, and executive notions. As such a supermetaphor becomes enriched, it can gradually take on the features of a genuine theory.

   • 2016, Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor, →ISBN, page 17:

     Combining the stability of architecture, the fluidity of water, and the vitality of plant life, the root is a kind of supermetaphor that subsumes the others.

3. A metaphor that is particularly widespread or dominant.
   • 1973, The New York Times Book Review - Volume 78, page 52:

     "Mother" as supermetaphor for "man's projection of the ideal" is dealt a final blow by McBride's organized exposition of the alternative: female parents and male parents — "because no one sex and no one person should be responsible for...

   • 2004, Jonathan Beaty, S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI, →ISBN, page xxiii:

     BCCI suddenly bloomed as a sort of supermetaphor for the INTRODUCTION: THE DEVIL'S PAYMASTER.

   • 2016, Dawn Keetley, Angela Tenga, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, →ISBN:

     Gerhart von Graevenitz (1994) also problematizes the current supermetaphor status of the term arabesque; before the “globalization of its catchment area,” he notes, the arabesque was a poetic paradigm of the Romantic period in literature.

4. A metaphor about metaphors.
   • 2016, Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, Linda L. Putnam, Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors, →ISBN:

     Driven by the demands of undergraduate teaching, Morgan wanted to translate Sociological Paradigms into a work that would appeal not only to academics and students of organization but also to practitioners. In pursuit of this aim, he alighted upon what we might characterize as a super-metaphor: the idea that “all theories are metaphorical.”