All messages are coded, and that includes scientific and scriptural texts as well as everyday communications in ordinary language. Use of a symbolic code both amplifies and ambiguates (or polyverts) the meaning of the sign. Michael Polanyi explains:
The mind which entrusts itself to the operation of symbols acquires an intellectual tool of boundless power; but its use makes the mind liable to perils the range of which seems also unlimited. … you cannot benefit from the formalization of thought, unless you allow the formalism which you have adopted to function according to its own operational principles, and to this extent you must abandon yourself to this functioning and risk being led into error. … We must commit ourselves to the risk of talking complete nonsense, if we are to say anything at all within any such system.
This is true also for ordinary language applying to matters of experience. It contains descriptive terms, each of which implies a generalization affirming the stable or otherwise recurrent nature of some feature to which it refers, and these testimonies to the reality of a set of recurrent features constitute, as we have seen (p. 80), a theory of the universe which is amplified by the grammatical rules according to which the terms can be combined to form meaningful sentences. So far as this universal theory is true, it will be found to anticipate, like other true theories, much more knowledge than was possessed or even surmised by its originators. We may recall as a crude model of this how even a small map multiplies a thousandfold the original input of information; and add to this that, actually, the number of meaningful and interesting questions one could study by means of such a map is much greater and not wholly foreseeable. Much less can we control in advance the myriads of arrangements in which nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs can be meaningfully combined to form new affirmations or questions, thus developing, as we shall see, the meaning of the words themselves ever further in these new contexts. Verbal speculation may therefore reveal an inexhaustible fund of true knowledge and new substantial problems, just as it may also produce pieces of mere sophistry.
How shall we distinguish between the two? The question cannot be fully answered at this stage; but from what has been already said, we can see, at least in outline, by what method the decision will have to be reached. Three things will have to be borne in mind: the text, the conception suggested by it, and the experience on which this may bear. [Semiotically: sign, interpretant, object.] Our judgment operates by trying to adjust these three to each other. The outcome cannot be predicted from the previous use of language , for it may involve a decision to correct, or otherwise to modify, the use of language. On the other hand, we may decide instead to persist in our previous usage and to reinterpret experience in terms of some novel conception suggested by our text, or at least to envisage new problems leading on to a reinterpretation of experience. And in the third place, we may decide to dismiss the text as altogether meaningless.
Thus to speak a language is to commit ourselves to the double indeterminacy due to our reliance both on its formalism and on our own continued reconsideration of this formalism in its bearing on experience. For just as, owing to the ultimately tacit character of all our knowledge, we remain ever unable to say all that we know, so also, in view of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in what we say.
— Polanyi 1962, 94-5