By "intervention" I mean interacting with the environment. Purpose a hypothesis, test, modify, test. You can frame RL this way though RL usually generates hypotheses that are far too naïve.

This looks like a good brief overview (I only skimmed it but wanted to give you more than "lol, google it") http://smithamilli.com/blog/causal-ladder/

Yes, you need to let the robot play (interact with the environment) to learn the vision-versus-touch correlations, but you can do so in an unsupervised way (as long as you choose the environment wisely).