Let us turn now to the historicity of human action. When positivists let meanings drop out of their explanations, they point to classifications, correlations, and regularities that hold across various cases. Even when they renounce the ideal of a universal theory, they still regard historical contingency and contextual specificity as obstacles that need to be overcome in the search for cross-temporal and cross-cultural regularities. Positivists characteristically search for causal connections that bestride time and space. They try to control for all kinds of variables to arrive at parsimonious explanations.