Mardalsfossen, a waterfall in a Norwegian fjord, and refused to descend until plans to build a dam were dropped. Though the demonstrators were carried away by police and the dam was eventually built, the demonstration launched a more activist phase of Norwegian environmentalism. In 1996, he won the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, known as the "little Nobel". In 2005 he was decorated as a Commander with Star of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav for socially useful work. Næss was a minor political candidate for the Norwegian Green Party in 2005. Philosophy Næss's book Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalten (1936) anticipated many themes familiar in post-war analytic philosophy. In the 21st century, Næss came to be recognized by newer generations of philosophers as a pioneer of (a term that Næss himself used) for his empirical semantics research. One of Næss's early publications on experimental philosophy was "Truth" as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers (1938). Næss's main philosophical work from the 1950s was entitled Interpretation and Preciseness (1953). This was an application of set theory to the problems of language interpretation, extending the work of semanticists such as Charles Kay Ogden in The Meaning of Meaning. A simple way of explaining it is that any given utterance (word, phrase, or sentence) can be considered as having different potential interpretations, depending on prevailing language norms, the characteristics of particular persons or groups of users, and the language situation in which the utterance occurred. These differing interpretations are to be formulated in more precise language represented as subsets of the original utterance. Each subset can, in its turn, have further subsets (theoretically ad infinitum). The advantages of this conceptualisation of interpretation are various. It enables systematic demonstration of possible interpretation, making possible evaluation of which are the more and less "reasonable interpretations". It is a logical instrument for demonstrating language vagueness, undue generalisation, conflation, pseudo-agreement and effective communication. Næss developed a simplified, practical textbook embodying these advantages, entitled Communication and Argument: Elements of Applied Semantics (1966), which became a valued introduction to this pragmatics or "language logic", and was used over many decades as a sine qua non for the preparatory examination at the University of Oslo, later known as examen philosophicum ("exphil"). Recommendations for public debate Næss's book Communication and Argument (1966) included his recommendations for objective public debate. Næss argued for adhering to the following principles to make