As Clinton once said: it depends on what your definition of “is” is.

There might be an absolute ground Truth (with a capital T) that is what is really happening. And there might be a number of other truths (lowercase) that have exactly the same math but are not real. Does it even matter to us? For example, we count apples, and add the counts to other counts. We don’t count the actual apples for the sum, but have a system that works 100% of the time; it is not really what is happening. Does that matter if the answer is right all the time?