When to Expect Violations of Causal Faithfulness and Why It Matters

Abstract

I present three reasons why philosophers of science should be more concerned about violations of causal faithfulness (CF). In complex evolved systems, mechanisms for maintaining equilibrium states are highly likely to violate CF. Even when such systems do not precisely violate CF, they may nevertheless generate precisely the same problems for inferring causal structure from probabilistic relationships in data as do genuine CF violations. Thus, potential CF violations are particularly germane to experimental science when we rely on probabilistic information to uncover causal structures since we cannot then use those structures to predict the right experiments to ‘catch out’ hidden causal relationships.