Quine on Shared Language and Linguistic Communities Matej Drobňák 1 Received: 1 March 2017 /Revised: 9 July 2017 /Accepted: 6 October 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 Abstract In this paper, I discuss Quine’ s views on language sharing and linguistic communities. It is sometimes explicitly and often implicitly taken for granted that Quine believes that speakers can form communities in which they share a language. The aim of the paper is to show that this is a misinterpretation and, on the contrary, Quine is closer to linguistic individualism – the view according to which there is no guarantee that speakers within a community share a language and the notion of idiolect is more fundamental than the notion of shared language. Keywords Quine . Meaning . Shared Language . Publicity . Flexible Community . Linguistic Individualism 1 Introduction If we want to give a general account on what natural languages are, how they are formed by speakers and how communication works we have basically two options: to take either the notion of shared language or the notion of idiolect as fundamental. We can include Lewis (1969, 1975) or normative inferentialists such as Brandom (1994, 2000) and Peregrin (2014) among those who take the notion of shared language as fundamental. On the other side of the spectrum, we can find people like Chomsky (1986, 1992, 1995) or Davidson’ s views on communication (1986, 1994) and some of his followers. 1 Philosophia https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9916-y 1 E.g. Ludlow (2014) or Glüer (2013), though their interpretations of Davidson differ. * Matej Drobňák matej.drobnak@gmail.com 1 Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové, náměstí Svobody 331, 50003 Hradec Králové, Czech Republic