I should therefore say, instead of ‘I wish this paper were red’, something like ‘I wish a pale red for this paper’”. But if in the usual way of speaking he had said, “I wish a pale red for this paper”, we should, in order to fulfill his wish, have painted it a pale red ‒ ‒ ‒ and this wasn't what he wished. On the other hand there is no objection to adopting the form of expression which he suggests as long as we know that he uses the phrase, “I wish a pale x for this paper”, always to mean what ordinarily we express by “I wish this paper to have the colour x”. What he said really recommended his notation, in the sense in which a notation can be recommended. But he did not tell us a new truth and did not show us that what we said before was false. (All this connects our present problem up with the problem of negation. I will only give you a hint, by saying that a notation would be possible in which, to put it roughly, a quality had always two names, one for the case when something is said to have it, the other for the case when something is said not to have it. The negation of “This paper is red” could then be, say, “This paper is not rode”. Such a notation would actually fulfill some of the wishes which are denied us by our ordinary language and which sometimes produce a cramp of philosophical puzzlement about the idea of negation.)