Rosenthal provides a kind of alternative to the ideas of consciousness and qualia as fundamental features of things mental. However, unlike the attacks on particular arguments for or views of qualia that we've seen in Lewis and Churchland, Rosenthal offers an account of consciousness in terms of thought, something that, while mysterious in its own right has, in recent philosophical work on the mental, often been regarded as less mysterious than the phenomenal. You've seen Rosenthal mentioned before. Blocks "Concepts of Consciousness" describes and criticizes an earlier version of his theory, and you should look back at that account (see pp. 214, col. 2, and 215, col. 1, in Chalmers).

Rosenthal gives a good account of the structure of his paper at the end of his introduction, but that could also be confusing because the section numbers he cites do not agree with what you'll find in your text (in particular, there is no section VI). Apparently, what he refers to in the introduction as sections II and III were at some point combined into a single section because the material he ascribes to them all appears in your section II. After that section numbers in your text are one less than the ones he refers to (so what he refers to as section IV is your section III, etc.). You should, of course, pay special attention to Rosenthal statement of his "hypothesis" but, given the things we've been discussing, we should spend some time also talking about his attempt to account for what he calls "sensory consciousness" and his responses to Block's views (sections III and IV in the numbering in your text).

Finally, let me comment on a couple technical terms Rosenthal uses. A "speech act" is any of the many things that can be done in using language--asserting, promising, warning, etc. One example Rosenthal cites is the act of reporting non-inferentially. The "illocutionary force" of an utterance is what makes it a particular sort of speech act. Rosenthal extends this idea to speak of comparable aspects of thoughts; for example, an "assertoric mental attitdue" is a mental attitude corresponding to the illocutionary force that is characterisic of assertions.