It is a source of frustration to brilliant people to be unable to persuade their intellectual inferiors, and a natural reaction is to seek more time to persuade, knowing they can out-argue their duller colleagues. What they may not realize, being intellectuals and therefore exaggerating the power of reasoned argument, is that such argument is ineffectual when the arguers do not share common premises and—what turns out to be related—that people do not surrender their deep-seated beliefs merely because they cannot match wits with the scoffers. (Robert Bork’s intellectual distinction did not disarm his opponents.) In such situations the principal effect of arguing is, as Thurman Arnold noted and the psychological literature on group behavior confirms, to drive the antagonists farther apart—or at least to cause them to dig in their heels.
(Richard A. Posner, How Judges Think [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008], 302 [footnote omitted])
Note from KBJ: Suppose I construct a valid argument with two premises and a conclusion, with the aim of persuading you to accept the conclusion. I force you to do one of the following: (1) reject the first premise; (2) reject the second premise; (3) accept the conclusion. Suppose you reject the first premise. Then I must construct a second valid argument that has that premise as a conclusion. This process must continue until you accept all of the premises. Most people give up before they reach this point.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 