> Hello Professor,
> I just had a question with regards to the part of the lecture which you
> have talked about cause or mechanism, evidence, truth, and definition.
> I was a little confused with the way it was written on the board, whether
> the order they were presented to us had particular reasons for them.
> This was the way the list were presented on the board.
> 
> mechanism or cause
> _____________________________
> evidence or Practical Test
> _____________________________
> What makes    | definition
> it true
> 
> Are these simply key elements that we must have in mind when
> philophisizing? I was especially confused with the way the last two were
> presented at the bottom. Is there a reason the two were split on the same
> line: should either of them have gone below the other, or does it not
> matter?

What that chart shows are four different notions such that beginners
often confuse one of them with another one, so we have to take special
steps to emphasize their differences. The bottom two are two separate
notions. I could have put them on two lines. I started with them on a
single line because you could call them both "definitions." It was only
as our discussion progressed that it emerged there were two different
ideas that we might be calling "definitions." The one idea is trying to
figure out what is the "definition" of something we already understand.
What does justice mean, what does it consist in. What makes it true that
some distribution of social goods is just? What IS justice, really?
Those are different ways of asking the same kind of question. That's one
thing we could mean by asking for a definition of justice. The other
thing we sometimes mean by definition is where someone just stipulates,
"In this discussion, I will use 'justice' as shorthand for a
distribution of social goods where everyone has equal opportunities (but
not necessarily equal wealth)." Now a person makes such stipulations
because they think they're at least in the vicinity of talking about the
folk, pre-theoretic, common-sense notion of justice. But they're not
trying to *argue that* they've properly defined justice. They are
saying, look I'm just going to talk this way. In my mouth, the word
"justice" will be code or shorthand for what I just described. This
makes discussion go faster than if I said "a distribution of social
goods where everyone has equal opportunities" every time. The activity
of stipulatively defining things is useful in any kind of abstract
theoretical discussion. The activity of digging into our concept of
justice and trying to figure out what is the RIGHT definition of it is
also useful. But these are different activities. One can use the word
"definition" to talk about both of them, but it's important not to
confuse them.

I hope that helps. This may become easier to understand when you see
some examples where it will be important to keep track of whether we're
talking of definitions in the one sense or in the other sense.