Storytelling

Mink and MacIntyre, as discussed in class, are philosopher who were mainly interested in the relationship between story telling and truth. This connection was also a point Barabara Hardy brought up in her essay An Approach Through Narrative: Towards a Poetics of Fiction. However, they differed in that Hardy discussed how story-telling transgressed beyond literary works into reality while Mink and MacIntyre wanted to connect the story-telling aspect to revealing truth.
When one is recalling the day's events to another there is a bit of storytelling woven into the way the information is being stated. The truth is usually exaggerated in order to present an entertaining form of what really happened. It doesn't mean that storytelling prevents the truth from being presented, it just attaches more bells and whistles to it. One group of people may find blatant lies within a story-tale, but another group may take it as the whole truth.
In my Imagining American Religion class last semester I learned about tribal groups and their religion ceremonies. They didn't have a written language so they relied heavily on story-telling to pass down traditions. In some religious story-tales the sacred world and humans as animals were talked about as if such things existed. To certain people their tales would seem like outright lies; just fairy tales. Yet, to these people what they spoke of was very real to them. So truth is arbitrary; it is different for everyone.