A collaboration between three distinguished professors of linguistics and philosophy. This book is a result, not only of the collaboration of the three authors but of two universities--the University of the Basque Country and Stanford University. In 1986, the late Jesus Mari Larrazabal and John Etchemendy met at a conference. They started talking about Etchemendy's Basque heritage, which was evident to Larrazabal from his name. Then they discussed logic and philosophy and found they had a lot in common in addition to being Basque. They became friends and Etchemendy visited the University of the Basque Country. Soon John and Nancy Etchemendy brought John and Frenchie Perry with them on a visit to Donostia, and they met Kepa Korta, then finishing up his doctoral dissertation directed by Larrazabal. On his next trip, Perry was awarded an honorary doctorate.

Years later, María de Ponte started working with Kepa Korta as a postdoctoral researcher and met John Perry at a workshop on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Rhetoric organized by the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information.