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The complexity of any given cognitive phenomenon, such as “scientific discovery”, “technical expertise”, or “natural language understanding”, requires a multidisciplinary approach. Presents, within the framework of such an approach, some visible evidences of how these very different phenomena are closely rooted in the same highly inventive cognitive process, abduction. These evidences will be provided out of examples from both everyday language interpretation and law making expertise.

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We propose an analysis of the codified Law of France as a structured system. Fifty two legal codes are selected on the basis of explicit legal criteria and considered as vertices with their mutual quotations forming the edges in a network which properties are analyzed relying on graph theory. We find that a group of 10 codes are simultaneously the most citing and the most cited by other codes, and are also strongly connected together so forming a "rich club" sub-graph. Three other code communities are also found that somewhat partition the legal field is distinct thematic sub-domains. The legal interpretation of this partition is opening new untraditional lines of research. We also conjecture that many legal systems are forming such new kind of networks that share some properties in common with small worlds but are far denser. We propose to call "concentrated world".

We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that this network distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices.In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system.