Work in philosophy of mind often engages in descriptive phenomenology, i.e., in attempts to characterize the phenomenal character of our experience. Nagel’s famous discussion of what it’s like to be a bat demonstrates the difficulty of this enterprise (1974). But while Nagel located the difficulty in our absence of an objective vocabulary for describing experience, I argue that the problem runs deeper than that: we also lack an adequate subjective vocabulary for describing phenomenology. We struggle to describe our own phenomenal states in terms we ourselves find adequately expressive. This paper aims to flesh out why our phenomenological vocabulary is so impoverished – what I call the impoverishment problem. As I suggest, this problem has both practical and philosophical import. After fleshing out the problem in more detail, I draw some suggestive morals from the discussion in an effort to point the way forward towards a solution.

心灵哲学的工作经常涉及描述性现象学，即试图描述我们经验的现象特征。内格尔关于成为一只蝙蝠的感受的著名讨论表明了这项事业的难度（1974）。但是，虽然内格尔将困难归咎于我们缺乏描述经验的客观词汇，但我认为问题比这更深层：我们还缺乏足够的主观词汇来描述现象学。我们很难用我们自己认为足够表达的术语来描述我们自己的现象状态。本文旨在充实为什么我们的现象学词汇如此匮乏——我称之为贫乏问题。正如我所建议的，这个问题具有实际意义和哲学意义。在更详细地阐述问题之后，我从讨论中得出了一些具有启发性的道德准则，试图指出解决方案的前进方向。