Arthur says there is no good German translation for read-out, leaving him uncertain what is meant. I thought this might be of general interest for people.
The German translation of TSK uses the term “Anzeige” as a translation for “read-out,” but this does not seem to me too useful. It means something more like “notice.”
The literal meaning of “read-out” is a result produced by a computer or similar device that shows the result of a process. And that is a fairly close to the TSK meaning. Here is the definition from LOK (the glossary): “The informing, communicative output by time of a particular focal setting on space, based on a certain way of knowing being in place.”
So let me put that a little differently. We operate with a certain understanding of time and space, and these make a certain knowledge available. Based on this way of knowing, we have a certain view of what is real and what is not. Our view of what is real is the “read-out.”
This is something like an old computer term: “Garbage in, Garbage out.” In other words, the end result depends on what we bring to the system. So “read-out” suggests that our understanding of reality is like any kind of system. We start with an orientation (‘our’ time and ‘our’ space), or what time and space are like for us. And the outcome is a world. That world of course claims to be real, to be ‘the way things are’. But the read-out principle suggests that any particular version of reality is just a read-out of the starting assumptions, where those assumptions are related to the t-s-k triad.
I hope that helps.
Jack