What's the purpose of setting a property on an already initialized component?

What's the purpose of setting a property on an already initialized component?

I'm trying to modify the plugin options but none seem to work.
What's the purpose of doing something like the following:


$( ".selector" ).listview( "option" , "inset" , true );


if the inset mode won't change the visualization even after doing something like:

$( ".selector" ).listview( "refresh" );

it changes the option value but why give the user access to this option if changing the value wont actually change the plugin visually?
So far only thing refresh has done for me is to let me add new items to the list but none of the options seem to work.