This chapter argues that perception is best understood as fundamentally a matter of employing perceptual capacities. It presents the basic commitments of this view, examines the notion of capacities in play, and contrasts the view with naïve realism and austere representationalism. The capacities-first view can be contrasted with a number of alternative approaches in philosophy of mind. The capacities-first view can equally be contrasted with a number of alternative approaches in epistemology. In contrast to the centrality of capacities in psychology and neuroscience and despite their prominence in the history of philosophy, questions about mental capacities have been neglected in recent philosophical work. The capacities-first approach allows us to give a substantive answer to the hallucination question while acknowledging that perceptual states are constituted by the particulars perceived. It is compatible with both particularism and attributionalism.