The fourth of four Maxims of Root Metaphors in World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942) describes root metaphors that have become fallacies through losing contact with their world hypotheses.
Worse than Maxim III: Eclecticism Is Confusing is a case where a root metaphor continued to be used, without the structural corroboration of a world hypothesis.
> §7. _Maxim, IV: Concepts which have lost contact with their root metaphors are empty abstractions_.
> This fault is one stage worse than eclecticism, and is very likely to grow out of it. > When a world theory grows old and stiff (as periodically it does and then has to be rejuvenated), men begin to take its categories and subcategories for granted and presently forget where in fact these come from, and assume that these have some intrinsic and ultimate cosmic value in themselves. > * The concepts are often pretty thin by that time, little more than names with a cosmic glow about them. > * Such has been the fate of many good terms and some not so good—substance, matter, mind, spirit, God, ego, consciousness, essence, identity, phlogiston, ether, force, energy, magnetism. > As a fallacy this cognitive propensity is sometimes called hypostatization. [p. 113, editorial paragraphing added]
Categories have meaning within a world hypothesis, tied to a root metaphor. Asserting the validity of a category without a root metaphor is empty.
> [....] Terms are only genuinely hypostatized, clearly, if some cognitive weight is given to their very emptiness, if the absence of evidence they have attained is actually used as evidence -- word magic, in short. A term or concept is no better than the corroborative evidence it stands for. When it begins to demand respect in its own right, it is beginning to be hypostatized. [p. 114]