Joel West 

PhD Candidate 

Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

 University of Toronto 

Studying the Semiotics of Medicine

Areas of Study: Cognitive Semiotics, Semiotics of Medicine, Medicine and Popular Culture, Philosophy of Medicine, Philosophy of Mind, Semiotics of Medicine 

Thesis title: The Incredible Disappearing Patient: How Doctors treat Illnesses and not People

My academic interests in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science and the Semiotics of Medicine concerns the manner in which we both understand and create meanings, how we encode them, how we decode them, and how we communicate them effectively. I am interested, also, in how these intersect with meaning and popular culture. Past publications (see below) include such diverse subjects as Forensic Semiotics, Linguistic Anthropology and Narratology where I attempt to understand how it is that we understand ourselves and our surroundings using interdisciplinary methodologies via an interdisciplinary lens. I am interested in how we reconcile our internal sensorium with what we perceive as the outside world, and then how we in turn create meaning and fields of meaning for others.

Publications : See Google Scholar