The term 'background-independence' originated in 1980s string theory and was popularized in the 1990s Witten–Rovelli/Smolin dispute

physicsphilosophy-of-physicshistory-of-physicsbackground-independencestring-theoryloop-quantum-gravityhist-pharxiv

Per Vinck & De Haro's historical account, explicit use of the term "background-independence" first appears in the 1980s among string theorists (citing Horowitz et al., 1986) arguing that background fields — such as the target-space metric in string theory — should be dynamically determined rather than fixed. The term was then popularized through a polemical 1990s exchange between two camps: Edward Witten (1992, 1994, 1996), advocating for background-independence as an achievable property within string theory, versus Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin (1994, 1995; see also Smolin 2001, 2006), who treated background-independence as a foundational principle of the loop quantum gravity research program and used it to argue that string theory, by contrast, failed to take seriously a central lesson of general relativity.

This dispute is the backdrop that makes the paper's present-day question — whether Witten's CLPW-algebra claim actually counts as background-independent — a live and recognizably continuous one: the same figure (Witten) is still the one making background-independence claims about string-theory-adjacent constructions three decades later, and the term still lacks the single settled definition the 1990s dispute might have been expected to force.