اختلفوا في أن الاستعارة مجاز لغوي أو عقلي
Scholars differed over whether metaphor is linguistic majāz or intellectual majāz.
Linguistic account: a word is used outside its assigned meaning. “Asad” is assigned to the animal but applied to a courageous person.
Intellectual account: the decisive figurative act is a mental claim that the courageous person belongs to the class of lions. On this view, the imagined class-membership underlies the apparent application of the term.
The disagreement concerns the locus of the rhetorical move: transfer in linguistic signification or a prior conceptual judgment about the compared subject.