Invisibly impoverished ideas

Today I was walking along thinking about a thing, and the thing had a pretty clear sense—I could gaze upon it in my mind, and was thinking a bunch of related things about it. But it didn’t really have a name, and had I tried to describe it I think I would have got some of the pragmatic facts right but missed the actual, er, let’s say ‘thought-feeling’ of it. And then I crossed the road, and it disappeared. And I could try to talk about it by saying the words I had just been saying, but since I was no longer experiencing the relevant thought-feeling and the words didn’t describe it that well, I basically felt like I sort of no longer knew what I was talking about.

I wonder if something like this happens with words that I more confidently keep using, and just don’t notice that I can’t remember what I’m talking about. For instance, I suspect that when I’m not in pain, I don’t really know what it is like, and just think of it as abstract negativeness for most purposes, which I understand mathematically. 

And usually it doesn’t seem that important to have a subjective feeling of things—like, I think I understand the concept of a prisoners’ dilemma ok without having been in one that I can bring to mind—but if the thing you are talking about *is* a feeling, and you lack a feeling of it, that seems more serious. 

Arguably most important things aren’t feelings, so maybe it doesn’t matter much. But maybe a lot of things are comprised partly of thought-feelings - where I can have a visceral sense of the thing and what it is like and why it is important, but where that sense isn’t very explicit, and isn’t necessarily generated just by saying the explicit words about it that I might think to say. So maybe it can only really be brought to mind by the right circumstances, or by some other person describing it in a particular way. And other times the apparently same idea seems utterly uninspiring, and I don’t realize that that is because I’m missing the half the concept that was only in the realm of thought-feelings.