While concurring entirely, let me add another, related motivation for wanting to know the origin of your concepts (one which applies quite strongly in, for instance, both philosophy and psychology):
Many concepts, conceptual frameworks, positions, etc., are born out of disputes. Concepts do not arise in a vacuum, and writers do not write in a vacuum; they are often responding to things other people—their contemporaries—have said, or are saying.
But if you don’t know what someone was responding to, you have no hope of grasping their motivations for saying what they were saying; and consequently you’ll fail to understand what they meant.
Often this takes the following form: there is some dispute, and one side takes position A, and the other side, position B. Much later, you—reading the latter side’s works out of context—encounter position B. It seems to you to be rather absurd, and obviously wrong, so you dismiss it. But what you’re missing is that “B” should really be read as “not A”—which is to say, that the thrust of the argument is “A is wrong; the truth is really more like B”. If you knew the context, you’d agree that A is absurd; and that B is a correction in the right direction. An overcorrection? Perhaps; but that is a secondary point.
Thus you dismiss the author of B as deluded, when in fact he may have been the one sane man in a dispute filled with madmen!
(Finding examples of this dynamic is left as an exercise for the reader…)
While concurring entirely, let me add another, related motivation for wanting to know the origin of your concepts (one which applies quite strongly in, for instance, both philosophy and psychology):
Many concepts, conceptual frameworks, positions, etc., are born out of disputes. Concepts do not arise in a vacuum, and writers do not write in a vacuum; they are often responding to things other people—their contemporaries—have said, or are saying.
But if you don’t know what someone was responding to, you have no hope of grasping their motivations for saying what they were saying; and consequently you’ll fail to understand what they meant.
Often this takes the following form: there is some dispute, and one side takes position A, and the other side, position B. Much later, you—reading the latter side’s works out of context—encounter position B. It seems to you to be rather absurd, and obviously wrong, so you dismiss it. But what you’re missing is that “B” should really be read as “not A”—which is to say, that the thrust of the argument is “A is wrong; the truth is really more like B”. If you knew the context, you’d agree that A is absurd; and that B is a correction in the right direction. An overcorrection? Perhaps; but that is a secondary point.
Thus you dismiss the author of B as deluded, when in fact he may have been the one sane man in a dispute filled with madmen!
(Finding examples of this dynamic is left as an exercise for the reader…)