Joel West 

PHD Candidate

 University of Toronto 


Studying the Philosophy of Science

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


My interest in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Semiotics 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 also interested in the manner in which we depict our interactions with others as reflected in 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.