The point of my remark was not to give the mechanism in detail, though, but just to distinguish the following two ways of acquiring causal concepts:

(1) Blind luck plus selection based on fitness of some sort. (2) Reasoning from other concepts, goals, and experience.

Yes, it's (2) that I'm interested in. Is there some small set of axioms, on the basis of which you can set up causal reasoning, as has been done for probability theory? And which can then be used as a gold standard against which to measure our untutored fumblings that result from (1)?