Not only words, but thoughts themselves, are ambiguous. One reason for this is because we only have partial access to the machinery representing thoughts. A second reason is that thinking about thoughts changes them, "the problem is that our states of mind are usually subject to change".
If all of this is ambiguous, then why do we have a clear sense of most sentence meanings? 1) Context. 2) We are adept with coping with ambiguity, because we always deal with the ambiguity of our own thoughts.
(NB: Just a thought -- decreasing ambiguity, by instantiating soft constraints, is a very very common use of connectionist networks.)
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