Because one of the fundamental questions in philosophy has always been whether knowledge comes from empirical sense experience or whether it comes from somewhere else.
Having a definitive answer to this question could be thought to potentially shed light on that.
Plato would probably argue that shape concepts are innately available to consciousness, and that when the blind person touches a sphere (for example), he connects that with his innate conception of a sphere. So Plato probably would have expected the suddenly non-blind person to be able to immediately connect his tactile experience of a sphere with his visual experience of a sphere.
British empiricist philosophers would probably have argued along the lines that there is no such thing as an internal conception of a sphere. So they would disagree with Plato.
Of course, the true answer is that neither Plato's team nor the empiricists were completely right. There are concepts, but they are formed based on sense data, not based on some kind of innate knowledge.
Having a definitive answer to this question could be thought to potentially shed light on that.
Plato would probably argue that shape concepts are innately available to consciousness, and that when the blind person touches a sphere (for example), he connects that with his innate conception of a sphere. So Plato probably would have expected the suddenly non-blind person to be able to immediately connect his tactile experience of a sphere with his visual experience of a sphere.
British empiricist philosophers would probably have argued along the lines that there is no such thing as an internal conception of a sphere. So they would disagree with Plato.
Of course, the true answer is that neither Plato's team nor the empiricists were completely right. There are concepts, but they are formed based on sense data, not based on some kind of innate knowledge.