The orthodox view in contemporary philosophy of perception is that perceptual experiences represent the environment as being a certain way to a subject. I argue against this view on the ground that it cannot provide a coherent and plausible account of what I call 'the epistemic privilege' of perceptual experience. That privelege, roughly, consists in the fact that, very often, perceptual experiences explain, in an epistemically significant way, certain judgments or beliefs (one believes the lemon to be bitter because it tastes bitter; one judges that there are enemy troops in the valley because one is seeing their encampment) whilst judgments and beliefs never explain perceptual experiences in the same way (one does not taste the lemon to be bitter because one judges that it is so etc. etc.). The thesis is that the representational theory of perceptual experience assimmilates perceptual experience so closely to belief and judgement that their epistemic privilege relative to belief and judgment becomes mysterious. In particular I argue that the claim that perceptual experiences, unlike beliefs and judgments, have 'phenomenal character' (there is 'something it is like' to have perceptual experiences but not to make judgements or have beliefs)delivers no satisfying account of this privilege. The paper is meant to lay the foundations for a non-representational theory of perception (a 'confrontational' theory) according to which the 'content' of perceptual experience does not consist in a set of truth conditions which may or may not be 'satisfied' by the world on a given occasion, but rather by the world itself. On that view perceptual experience enjoys epistemic privilege relative to belief and judgment because, in having such experiences, we confront or encounter the very things about which we have beliefs or make judgments. This conception of perceptual experience should not be uncongenial to psychologists and cognitive scientists even though it rejects the very idea that perceptual experiences are representations of the environment.