Michael S. Kochin writes in Argumentation 23, No. 3 (August 2009).:
There are, however, two fundamental rhetorical difficulties with laying out one’s premises, reasoning, and conclusions. Since arguments are anticlimactic if they are explicit, the speaker who is excessively explicit in his or her reasoning is liable to fall into what one may call “the arguer’s dilemma,” with its two horns, the horn of banality and the horn of incomprehensibility. Either the audience can see where you are going before you get there (first horn), or they can’t (second horn). If they can see where you are going, they will lose attention, since to quote Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969 §98, 469), “an anticipated argument is a banal argument,” and the arguer has impaled himself on the horn of banality. If the audience can’t see where you are going, that is, in all likelihood, because they can’t follow the thread of your argument, and the arguer loses their attention as he squirms gored and suspended on the horn of incomprehensibility. If the audience can’t follow your argument, this means that even if you have managed to persuade them, we cannot say that they are persuaded to adopt your conclusion by accepting the argument you have offered for it.
So if you want to argue, you have to find some way out of the arguer’s dilemma: either you have to compose an argument that your audience is able to follow but not to anticipate—an extraordinary achievement—or you have to aim in arguing at some effect other than persuading your audience of the truth of your conclusion through their following and accepting your argument…
…outside mathematics, and certainly in practical affairs, the facts are never all on the table: the question is whether one has the resources to challenge the factual assertions that lead to the conclusions one wishes to reject—whether one can find the key or pick the lock. The issue is what the sociologist of science Bruno Latour has called a “trial of strength”: can you muster the resources required to overcome your opponents’ facts? This can be done by disputing the truth of your adversary’s facts, that is, by arguing, since, The New Rhetoric puts it, “recourse to argumentation is unavoidable whenever… proofs are questioned by one of the parties” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 8). More often, one puts the adversaries’ strength to the trial by offering alternative facts that make your opponents’ claims seem irrelevant—that is, if one has not been bludgeoned into aporia or absence of recourse by the force of the adversaries’ assertions into accepting their arguments.
…Gerald Rafshoon, Jimmy Carter’s principal advertising man in Carter’s 1980. Presidential reelection campaign: “If we had to do it all over again, we would take the 30 million dollars we spent in the campaign and get three more helicopters for the Iran rescue mission” (Popkin 1991, 4). One could claim, with Samuel Popkin, that Rafshoon’s statement shows the limits of image-making as against political reality. But we will better understand the gravity of Carter’s and Rafshoon’s problem if we remind ourselves that the most effective image of President Carter would have been a news broadcast of him receiving the freed hostages.
…In our life together discussion is instrumental to action: discussion is a cost, not a benefit, and so we can only afford some discussion, whether that discussion consists of facts or of arguments. Any new factual assertion threatens the solidarity we have achieved, and thus the ability to act which that solidarity has fostered.
