Fang, Wesley: When Dependence Disappears: Faithfulness and Effective Independence in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

Philosophy of Science. forthcomingThis article argues that nonlinear dynamical systems provide a structural mechanism for (near-)unfaithfulness that has received little attention in philosophical discussions of causal discovery. In such systems, observable statistical relations arise from invariant-measure averaging over state-dependent causal effects. Because local causal influences vary across the system’s state space, their contributions may partially cancel, weakening statistical dependenc