Meaning of supermetaphor | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A grounding fact; a correspondance between the underlying truth and our ideas and constructions based on that truth.
2. An overarching metaphor; a metaphor that encompasses several sub-metaphors.
3. A metaphor that is particularly widespread or dominant.
4. A metaphor about metaphors.

Examples

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“...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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“"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...”

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

“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.”

“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.””

CEFR level