ELI5: metalogic

In cooking, metalogic is like studying how cookbooks are written and whether recipes actually make sense, rather than just cooking the food itself.

Imagine you are in a kitchen.

• Regular logic is following a recipe step-by-step to bake a chocolate cake. If you add flour, sugar, and cocoa, and then bake it, you get a cake. You are using the rules of cooking to make something yummy.
• Metalogic is stepping out of the kitchen to look at the cookbook itself. You ask questions about the rules of cooking, like:

Here is an easy way to see the difference:

• Cooking (Logic): "I need two eggs to make pancakes, so I will crack two eggs."
• Thinking about cooking (Metalogic): "Why do we write recipes using ingredient lists and numbered steps? Does this method of writing recipes work for every meal in the world?"