Causality Program External Speaker Series

Title: What does logic have to do with causal inference?

Abstract: Many problems of causal inference can be understood in logical terms, spotlighting issues of entailment, expressive power of languages, and other core topics in logic. On the one hand, this perspective offers distinctive angles and insights into the theory of causal inference, witness new impossibility (e.g., “hierarchy”) results, complexity characterizations, and abstraction concepts. On the other hand, problems of causal inference introduce novel issues into logical theory, with rich and subtle variations on classical themes of mathematical logic: new notions of graph definability, “almost-everywhere” expressive gaps, and more. The aim of this talk will be to introduce this general perspective, with illustrations of constructive influence in both directions.