The last three chapters have focused on the identification of particular causal powers and the mechanisms that drive them – what Bhaskar calls retroduction (Lawson 1997: 24). But this focus may leave the argument seeming vulnerable: these powers and mechanisms may seem too simple to explain the chaotic complexity of our social world. And in each case they may seem to neglect a vast range of factors that tend to interfere with the operation of such basic mechanisms. This chapter, however, will reintroduce some of that complexity, by turning to the equally important question of analysing how those powers or mechanisms interact in the causation of individual actual events – retrodiction (Lawson 1997: 221). The realist model of social ontology does not seek to eliminate this complexity from the picture, but rather to abstract from it in the process of identifying the mechanisms at work so that we can use our understandings of these mechanisms as building blocks to construct explanations of actual events. This is the significance of what Bhaskar calls the multiple determination of actual events (discussed in chapter 3). If we wish to explain particular events, we need to understand much more than one particular causal power; we need to understand the many causal powers that interact to produce the event and how they affect each other.