metarule

meta- +‎ rule

metarule (plural metarules)

1. A rule that governs the application of other rules.
   • 1974, Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., chapter 9, in The Myth of Mental Illness‎, →ISBN, page 161:

     The existence and durability of social rules—irrespective of
     the sources to which man may have attributed them—is evi-
     dence of the intensity of the human need to follow rules.
     Indeed, man's need for rules and his propensity to follow them
     is equaled only by his desire to reject rules and be free of
     them. As I will try to show later,¹⁵ this antithetical disposition
     is a special instance of a more general human ambivalence—
     namely, the simultaneous needs for intimacy and solitude.
     Alternating attitudes of submission to and rebellion against
     people and rules may be best viewed as manifestations of this
     fundamental human paradox. One of the most useful methods
     for resolving this dilemma is our capacity for abstraction
     which makes it possible to construct progressively higher
     levels of symbolization; these constructs, in turn, lead to a
     lessening of the feeling of compulsion attached to rules explic-
     itly understood as rules. Thus, for each set of rules we can, in
     principle, construct a set of metarules. The latter are made up
     of the specifications governing the formation of the rules at the
     next lower (logical) level. Explicit awareness of metarules
     implies an understanding of the origin, function, and scope of
     the (next lower level) rules. Acquiring such understanding
     constitutes a form of mastery. Only by practicing what may be
     called the metarule attitude—which is actually a special case
     of the scientific attitude applied to the domain of rules—can
     we acquire a secure yet flexible integration of rules as behav-
     ior-regulating agencies. Finally, the metarule attitude enables
     us to increase our range of choices about whether or not to
     comply with rules, and whether or not to try to change them.