even if you hit all the assumptions you need to make Pearl/Rubin causality work, and there is no unobserved factor to cause problems, there is still a philosophical problem.
it all assumes you can divide the world cleanly into variables that can be the nodes of your DAG. The philosopher Nancy Cartwright talks about this a lot, but it’s also a practical problem.
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even if you hit all the assumptions you need to make Pearl/Rubin causality work, and there is no unobserved factor to cause problems, there is still a philosophical problem.
it all assumes you can divide the world cleanly into variables that can be the nodes of your DAG. The philosopher Nancy Cartwright talks about this a lot, but it’s also a practical problem.