This is similar to the idea that a number isn't always a number. A number can be categorical, in which case comparison operators don't make any sense. They can be a label or a name, in which case addition or other mathematical operators don't make any sense. The same way a number can be an address, which has its own sets of operations that operate on the idea of an address.

As an example, statistics has the idea of ordinal values vs interval values, where they have different properties that make them not comparable to each other and shouldn't be mistakenly be confused when working on them.