 The representationalist thesis is often formulated as the claim that phenomenal properties are representational or intentional. However, this formulation is ambiguous between a reductive and a non-reductive claim (though the term ‘representationalism’ is most often used for the reductive claim. See Chalmers 2004a). As a reductive claim, it means that the phenomenal content of an experience, the properties that characterize what it is like to have it (i.e., qualia), are certain extrinsic properties it represents. For example, the blueness one might mention in describing one’s experience (perceptual representation) of a clear sky at noon is a property of the sky, not of one’s experience of it. Blueness is relevant to the characterization of one’s experience because one’s experience represents it, not because one’s experience instantiates it. An experience of the sky no more instantiates blueness than a thought that snow is cold instantiates coldness. On this view, the phenomenal content of sensory experience is explained as its representation of extrinsic properties. (See Byrne and Tye 2006, Dretske 1995, Harman 1990, Lycan 1987, 1996 and Tye 2014, 2015 for elaboration and defense of this “qualia externalism.” See Thompson 2008 and Pitt 2017 for objections to this account.) (See also the entry on  representational theories of consciousness.)