One account associates imaginative metaphor with implicit metaphor: first the subject is assimilated to a comparison source, then a feature peculiar to that source is attributed to the subject.
A significant feature of al-Sakkaki’s exposition is that the imagined representation can be analyzed on its own, not always under the same requirement of an explicit prior implicit-metaphor construction used by other theorists.
This is more than a terminological dispute. It asks whether the transfer belongs to a word, to an imagined attribution, or to their combination.