It is difficult to understand all the reasons why so few efforts have been made to analyze our everyday dilemmas of truth-telling. The great distance which so often separates philosophers from applied concerns of any kind provides a partial answer. In philosophy, as elsewhere, professionalization has brought in its wake a vocabulary , a theoretical apparatus, and academic boundaries forbidding to outsiders and confining for those within. In part, also, the very background of truth and falsity against which lying must be seen has led many thinkers to set ever greater preliminaries to the moral questions of situations where truth seems to be at issue. How can we ever begin to probe such situations, they ask, unless we first know what "truth" means? In ethics, finally, attention has gone primarily to questions of meaning and theory quite remote from problems of concrete moral choice.
What does this mean? On my interpretation, philosophy has always tended to focus on the whole and is preoccupied with unified systems of morality that work akin to theoretical unified theories of physics. As a result, they tend to gloss over the stuff that we actually deal with on a day-to-day basis (e.g. truth-telling vs. deception). This doesn't interest or help most people. Not everybody is interested in a completely coherent system of thought but, rather, how to live day-to-day. More importantly, how should they act in specific situations. It is possible to infer our oughts from theoretical moral systems but, much of the time, this takes too much time for the individual scenarios people encounter every day. Furthermore, as she said and I once said, philosophy has become professionalized (for better or worse). In the same manner one can't easily jump from chemistry to law without adapting to the new jargon, many can't jump into philosophy without learning the jargon. And, especially so in philosophy, the jargon is not easy. Rather than one-phrase=one-idea, you could have one-phrase with several ideas and interpretations of that idea. Consider pragmatism, a particularly American school of philosophy. Charles Sanders Peirce was is considered the first proponent of pragmatism. However, later interpretations took the ideas in a direction he disagreed with and he renamed his collective thoughts as "pragmaticism." So if you want to learn about pragmatism in philosophy, you not only have to learn what Peirce said but what subsequent pragmatists said. Furthermore, you have to determine what exactly it was in subsequent pragmatists' interpretations that drove Perice away or why he found it incompatible with his thoughts. And this is just one school of philosophy in one area of philosophy.
Thinking extensively, for lack of a better word, is too time-consuming for most people. They usually can't afford this time to learn the theories and apply them. What philosophers need to do is ask people what problems they face in their daily lives and discuss these. Fortunately, applied ethics is close to what this is but it still draws heavily on the theories rather than the practical value for the everyday person.
