I'm a pragmatist about epistemology and science (as well as a neo-Kantian and an existentialist). So I'd explain the success of science in those terms. Science works in empowering us by exploiting real patterns in the environment.
I'd also distinguish between tracking real patterns and understanding them. The tools that track and model patterns may be relatively neutral. But to understand what the patterns are requires a kind of mental projection, an assimilation of nature's inhuman aspects to terms that make sense to us.
When those terms are maximally collective, meaning that they speak to our human capacities or they're meant to benefit our species, they're objective in a social, humanistic sense. We objectify to sustain "progress," meaning our species' mastery of the planet. So it's a special kind of collectivism that matters here.
In considering whether, say, stars are real, we need to keep in mind the relevant neo-Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. Stars as we conceive of them in our implicitly anthropocentric terms are phenomenal, not noumenal. Noumenally, stars include their interrelations to everything else in the universe, including the latter's earliest and later stages of evolution. Does your conception of stars include all of that information or does it simplify, departing conveniently from the full, inhuman, astronomical scale of stars in their cosmic role? If your conception simplifies--as it must to be personally and socially useful--your conception humanizes, which introduces a subjective aspect.
