Theorist Roy Bashkar suggests that the world can be nested into three domains:
- Empirical – events
- Actual – events, experiences
- Real – events, experiences, mechanisms
In deep narrative, we are interested in the mechanisms – the actants.
“The empirical contains the events that people actually experience. It is a subset of the actual, the full set of events that actually occur, regardless of whether or not people are aware of them.
That, in turn, is a subset of the real which includes objects, their structures and their causal powers as well.
It is important to note that the objects and structures may be able to exert certain causal powers, but the powers may not affect a given situation if the triggering conditions are not present, and even if they are triggered, their characteristic effects may not be actualized if other causal powers obstruct them.
The error of empiricism, then, is to build its ontology purely on the category of experience and thus to collapse all three domains into one.”