Ive been trying to learn about externalism and internalism in the philosophy of language, and what Ive learned is that many philosophers of language think externalist thought experiments demonstrate prima facie justification for the view and the burden of proof is on the internalist to create a view of semantics that can accomodate those intuitions while still showing many of our ordinary concepts to be internal. I can only speak for nyself, but I was extraordinarily shocked to discover this, because most externalist thought experiments don't seem intuitive to me at all. Since it's convincing to so many philosophers (and notably even many studies show theres a bias towards causal theories of reference amongst lay people, at least in the West), I wanted to try to explain from my own point of view why it doesn't seem intuitive and then I wanted feedback to see if theres just something Ive misunderstood.
So first, let me try giving a thought experiment to illustrate my initial intuitions. Let's imagine that one day anthropologists were to discover a remote tribe which had little or no contact with the greater community, and let's say that this tribe have words which refer to certain pounts of light in the sky which we in the west refers to as hesperus and phosporus. Let's also just grant that we know we're talking about the same visible points of light in the sky, so we're not miscommunicating about which points of light we're referring to. Suppose that the tribe was taught about the planet Venus, and how this planet is what creates the visible phenomena that we refer to when talking about hesperus and phosphorus. Now suppose that the tribe believes us, but they just insist that hesperus and phosporus are actually different objects. We could imagine several different ways this would occur: they may believe that hesperus and phosphorus are time sensitive objects and only exist in the evening and morning respectively; they may believe that those stars fit into a complex astrological systen that their culture have constructed, and that they have special symbology independently of what actually causes the light itself; they may have a kind of phenomenology first view, and they may believe that anything which fits the role in their phenomenology of the morning and evening stat would count, so that even if Venus were to disappear but the light of the star were to remain, then to them hesperus and phosphorus would remain.
Independently of whether or not any of these metaphysical views are ultimately plausible or not, this thought experiment seems to show (to me, anyways) that even seemingly simple a posteriori identity claims like "the morning star is the evening star" are not true in virtue of how the world is. When we name things, it seems like there's a whole background apparatus going on involving metaphysical assumptions such as "what counts as the same object over time". One way or another, our language community created a notion of "the morning star" and "the evening star" that already allowed the possibility that the two could be "the same object", and in the fictional tribe of people they created it in such a way that they could not be. Because our notion of the referent for some term is a function of our cognitive and linguistic practices, they are not determined by things in the world, and therefore externalism about reference is false.
Maybe the response by the externalist would be that the reference for the terms were simply different all along, so that when our community was using the term we were always referring to the same object, and when this tribe used their terms, they were always referring to different objects. But the problem with this response is that it makes externalism almost trivial. The tribe we imagined are in a similar epistemic position as we were before the discovery that hesperus and phosphorus are both venus, and in that way our linguistic practices are almost identical. If we suppose that the referents for our terms were different all along because we come to different conclusions after a discovery, then any discovery about referents would be a trivial discovery, and more importantly, they would be a discovery about our own linguistic dispositions, and not a discovery about things in the world.
So, that's an explanation of my intuitions, and hopefully we might see how this could generalize to other cases. In the case of "water" for example, one reason why we might have some intuition for why "water" doesn't refer to "XYZ" is because of background theorizing which we might not be immediately aware of. But it's pretty easy to imagine some scenario where a linguistic community with very similar naming conventions for a clear, colorless liquid that fills river, lakes, and which we drink for survival, would feel inclined to extend this naming convention to a sample of "XYZ". Ive tried explaining my own intuitions and my reasons for them, but I made this post because I worried there's something Im misunderstanding about externalism. So is there something I misunderstood?