The label ʿaqlī (عقلي) points to an attribution assessed at the level of intelligible relationships: to whom is the action ascribed, and how does that relation stand in the speaker's apparent understanding?
By contrast, lexical literalness or metaphor concerns whether a word is used in its established meaning or a connected meaning.
In «أنبت الربيع البقل» (“Spring brought forth vegetation”), “spring” still means the season. The rhetorical question concerns the attribution of causing growth to spring, not a changed dictionary meaning of the noun. The distinction prevents lexical metaphor and predicative metaphor from being conflated.