If metaphors are Structured Experience and using them successfully when Coping With Experience reinforces them, they become more real.
Crudely characterizing philosophical pragmatism 
as "truth is that which makes a difference in actions and results," a novel metaphor, as adopted, changes the reality that's accessible to the individual.
Lakoff and Johnson, p. 157:
> New metaphors, like conventional metaphors, can have the power to define reality. They do this through a coherent network of Entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others. The acceptance of the metaphor, which forces us to focus *only* on those aspects of our experience that it highlights, leads us to view the entailments of the metaphor as being *true*.
They point out that some truth claims cannot be separated from the underlying metaphor. For example, President Trump declared April 2, 2025, "liberation day ", evoking metaphors like Trade Is War and Tariffs Are Weapons. After a week, many of the tariffs were postponed. Some characterized that as a retreat . Others said that, actually, the original announcement was a clever feint.
But any debate whether it was *truly* a retreat or a feint must accept the underlying metaphors. For example, if Trump *retreated*, then trading partners must have *advanced*. But that claim is meaningless unless, like war, trade is a zero sum affair.
If, as virtually every economist believes, trade can be – and usually is – a win-win affair, the whole debate is a category error : what happened is that *all* parties were going to lose, and as of April 9 they're all going to lose somewhat less. (Because not all the tariffs were rescinded and those that remain are still historically high.)
Despite the best efforts of people who say, for example, that all the participants lost in World War I, that's not a possibility contemplated by an *X* Is War metaphor. We'd need to switch to something like Trade Is a Cooperative Game for a discussion over whether "we all lost" to have any oomph. (To not itself seem like a category error.)