Identifying intervention variables

The essential precondition of implementing interventionist techniques of causal reasoning is that particular variables are identified as so-called intervention variables. While the pertinent literature standardly brackets the question how this can be accomplished in concrete contexts of causal discovery, the first part of this paper shows that the interventionist nature of variables cannot, in principle, be established based only on an interventionist notion of causation. The second part then demonstrates that standard observational methods that draw on Bayesian networks identify intervention variables only if they also answer all the questions that can be answered by interventionist techniques—which are thus rendered dispensable. The paper concludes by suggesting a way of identifying intervention variables that allows for exploiting the whole inferential potential of interventionist techniques.