So Social Security is foolish. W hich brings us to informal logic, which is what most of us use in our daily lives, including our contact with editorial pages. Informal logic proceeds from the specific to the general. And where formal logic has some certainty, in informal logic there are only degrees of probability. We know or can observe some specific things, and we can say that these specifics probably warrant a logical conclusion.
Informal logic is a generalization based on samples, or a hypothesis based on evidence.
How valid the argument depends on how big the sample and how good the evidence. Tomorrow is Monday. It's going to rain tomorrow. Tomorrow is Monday. It will probably rain tomorrow.