A well established view in contemporary philosophy of mind is that perceptual experiences have representational content. This view is appealing primarily for three reasons. It explains the objective purport, the justificatory role and the metaphysics of experience better than sense-datum views. In this paper I argue that representational theories of perception can deliver these results only because they assimilate perception too closely to belief. Perception, unlike belief, is essentially sensory, presentational and objectual. Any theory which fails to capture these features should not count as a theory of perception at all.