Article one presents the rectification of names as Confucius's moral and political doctrine, that titles carry standards of conduct their holders must live up to. A rival school of classical Chinese thought took the same basic insight, that names and realities should correspond, and repurposed it for a considerably less moral and more administrative end.
Legalist thinkers, Han Feizi foremost among them, developed a doctrine sometimes called xingming, "form and name," requiring officials to state in advance what they proposed to accomplish, then holding them strictly accountable against that proposal: a minister who achieved less than promised was punished for falling short, and one who achieved more was punished too, since exceeding one's stated charge without authorisation was itself dangerous to the ruler's control. The Legalist version keeps Confucius's basic mechanism, checking words against outcomes, but strips out the moral content entirely, converting a doctrine about a father truly being a father into a technique of bureaucratic surveillance serving the ruler's power rather than any shared ethical order.
A different and more technical strand of the same interest appears in the logicians of the School of Names, Gongsun Long's paradox that "a white horse is not a horse" being the best known example, who treated the relationship between names and the things they denote as a problem in logic to be analysed for its own sake, with none of Confucius's concern for hierarchy or Han Feizi's concern for administrative control. The three treatments, moral, administrative and logical, share only the observation that names and realities can come apart, a reminder that one insight can be picked up by traditions pursuing entirely different projects.