Careful introspection reveals that both categorical perception and pure noncategorical thisness are relatively empty. Categorical perception is the experience of generality, that something is an instance, but being an instance comes to very little because our experience of the scope of categories is partial and incomplete. Using a thought experiment about brain-grayers (hypothetical people who are sightless from birth), the experience of noncategorical thisness also comes to very little, because every human experience includes categorical perception as well as thisness. Any attempt to describe thisness apart from categorical perception fails to capture what our experience is actually like.
A close lexical analysis of the word "see" and related perceptual verbs shows that the purported phenomenological distinction between the sensory given and what goes beyond it does not fully correspond to how we actually use these words. Reviewing mid-twentieth-century debates about "sees" and comparing the semantics of perceptual verbs with a philosophically neutral word, "climbs," reveals that the semantics of these words do not support separating "direct" or "immediate" perception from the products of "judgment" or "inference." If such a distinction is accessible by introspection, it would have to come from phenomenology directly and would require newly coined terminology.