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[Consider what Bertrand Russell says about “blue” in the passage below from his book Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948. Is it consistent with what he seems to be saying in his debate with Copleston in the same year his book came out?]

We see that the sky is blue, but a race of blind men could devise experiments showing that transverse waves of certain wave-lengths proceed from it, and this is just what the ordinary physicist quâ physicist, is concerned to assert. The physicist, however, does not trouble to assert, and the blind man cannot assert, the proposition: “When light of a certain frequency strikes a normal eye, it causes a sensation of blue.” This statement is not a tautology; it was a discovery, made many thousands of years after words for “blue” had been in common use. The question whether the word “blue” can be defined is not easy. We might say: “Blue” is the name of colour-sensations caused by light of such-and-such frequencies. Or we might say: “Blue” is the name of those shades of colour which, in the spectrum, come between violet and green. Either of these definitions might enable us to procure for ourselves a sensation of blue. But when we had done so, we should be in a position to say: “So that is blue.” This would be a discovery, only to be made by actually experiencing blue.

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