What did Bernard Williams mean by the “absolute conception” of reality?

In his work Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), the English philosopher Bernard Williams introduced the "absolute conception" of reality to describe an ideal of scientific objectivity.1

According to this conception, the world exists independently of any specific human perspective. While humans are constituents of the world and can only perceive it through their own limited or distorted viewpoints, the goal of scientific inquiry is to identify and compensate for these subjective biases. By doing so, science aims to approach a description of what is there "anyway"—a single, objective truth that exists regardless of the human point of view.1

Williams acknowledged the difficulty of attaining this ideal, as human thought is inevitably shaped by contingent biological faculties and historical circumstances. However, he maintained that the absolute conception remains a meaningful ambition, as it provides a framework for understanding the nature of reality and explaining human perceptions in relation to it. This concept is distinct from "Absolute Idealism," a separate philosophical tradition associated with figures like G.W.F. Hegel.12