Search

Explainable artificial intelligence increasingly seeks to provide more than visualisations of feature importance or simplified descriptions of model outputs. For intelligent systems used in consequential settings, machine reasoning should be open to questioning, inspection, contextualisation, correction, and evaluation under uncertainty. This integrative review examines emerging approaches that may support this broader objective. It connects causal explainability and counterfactual reasoning with neuro-symbolic intelligence, knowledge-grounded inference, uncertainty-aware explanation, reliability evaluation, and human-centred interpretability. The review uses a structured integrative approach to compare how these paradigms represent causes, alternatives, rules, concepts, knowledge sources, inferential steps, confidence, and limitations. Causal and counterfactual approaches can support questions about mechanisms, contrasts, interventions, actionability, and recourse, but their conclusions depend on explicit assumptions, feasible alternatives, and appropriate causal evidence. Neuro-symbolic and knowledge-grounded approaches can make concepts, relations, rules, provenance, and intermediate reasoning more traceable, although symbolic structure or retrieved knowledge does not automatically ensure faithful, valid, or truthful explanation. Uncertainty-aware approaches can qualify predictions and explanations through uncertainty characterisation, calibration, confidence communication, robustness assessment, and human interpretation, but uncertainty estimates alone do not establish reliability. The synthesis indicates that no individual paradigm is sufficient. More defensible machine reasoning requires complementary evaluation of explanation fidelity, causal plausibility, knowledge validity, reasoning traceability, uncertainty communication, cognitive accessibility, contestability, and lifecycle accountability. Important research opportunities concern causal validation, feasible recourse, provenance governance, explanation uncertainty, hybrid-system evaluation, human-centred testing, and cross-paradigm assessment. The review contributes an integrated account of how machine reasoning may become not merely visible, but meaningfully open to question.

Explainable artificial intelligence increasingly supports decisions whose consequences extend beyond prediction, yet many explanations remain grounded in associations, feature contributions, saliency, or local perturbations. Such outputs may clarify model behaviour without establishing what would happen under intervention, why an outcome arose through a particular mechanism, or whether a proposed change is feasible and decision-valid. This article develops a conceptual causal explainability framework for moving from prediction-oriented explanation toward intervention-aware reasoning. The framework begins by separating predictive, associative, and model-behaviour claims from causal questions. It then connects explicit causal assumptions with causal structures, mechanistic reasoning, interventional explanation, counterfactual reasoning, confounding assessment, identifiability, sensitivity, external validity, uncertainty communication, and human interpretation. Particular attention is given to the distinction between model counterfactuals and real-world recourse, the risks created by unmeasured confounding, selection and collider bias, and the need to define decision boundaries before explanations inform action. Human users are treated as active interpreters whose causal literacy, expertise, cognitive constraints, and susceptibility to false causal confidence affect explanation usefulness. The main contribution is an integrated framework that organizes the evidential transition from prediction to intervention while preserving explicit no-guarantee boundaries concerning causal truth, intervention validity, recourse, identifiability, human understanding, decision validity, and deployment readiness. The framework is intended to support disciplined conceptual development and evaluation planning, not to prescribe a universal causal model, intervention procedure, or operational decision system.