The ideal community provides people with the chance to act, the chance to be effective and become historical actors who maintain or revise the conditions of their endeavors. As one can see in The Task of Criticism, in order for that to be so we need to support something not unlike Karl Popper’s idea of an open society. Here Miller revisited the traditional connection between liberal democratic politics and the scientific community in which free and respectful speech is licensed, formal modes of criticism are supported, and orderly change and development is a key goal. In order to affect that, in both politics and science, Miller maintained that, as noted above, a historical and symbolic conception of rationality has to be endorsed.
