In the Baker Street Irregulars, we suspend all truth and simply believe that Holmes was (and is) real. It makes it so much easier that way.

by the way,

your mama is so fat and dumb that she thinks a higher-order thought is what you get when you decide to super-size your fries

Your proposed revision still assumes that there is such a property as being represented. Such an assumption is vulnerable to, among other things, the Bucket Argument.

I think I agree with you that this truth in fiction stuff is not a way to defuse the intuition behind the argument but as you know, I do not think that the unicorn’s horn is very pointy

It is not pointy for Rosenthal because he denies that the higher-order state transfers or confers a property. He explicitly denies that a conscious mental state is a first-order state that has the property of being represented by a higher-order thought. Though, I think you are right to be suspicious of this kind of move, it seems to me that it pretty much follows from his Quinian way of thinking, and since you seem to think that way too, then I wonder why you resist this way of solving the problem.

On the other hand, it is not pointy to at least one other way of construeing the higher-order thought theory. It may be true that conscious humans can have thoughts about things that don’t exist and so true that ‘we represent things that don’t exist’ but I don’t see why that means that the higher-order theorist is comitted to saying that the special kind of higher-order thought needed to be conscious of oneself as being in a certain first-order state (i.e. a thought to the effect that one is, onself, in a certain first-order state) ever represents something that doesn’t exist. It is perfectly possible that the area of the brain that is responsible for these specialized kind of thoughts (I’m looking at you pre-frontal cortex) is only capable of producing veridical thoughts. This would make the inuition behind the premise ‘we represent things that don’t exist’ guitly of the fallacy of division….One way of cashing this claim out, though not the way that Rosenthal does, is to postulate that the first-order state has to cause the higher-order state that represents it inorder for it (the first-order state) to count as a conscious state. If this is the case there would not ever be a case where the higher-order state represents oneself as being in a state that does not exist (though it may represent oneself as being in a state that one is not in fact in). So, on this modified higher-order thought theory that requires the first-order state to cause the higher-order state we could say that the first-order state comes to have the property of being represented, which property consists in the first-order state’s causing the higher-order thought that targets it…I spell this out in more detail in the third section of that paper down there, if you have the inclination to look at it…

Consciousness on my Mind: Implementing the Higher-order Strategy for Explaining What it’s Like