The School of Names has no founding teacher and no single text of doctrine, unlike Confucianism with Confucius or Mohism with Mozi. Later bibliographers grouped as Mingjia a set of disputers, bian zhe, who earned reputations one paradox at a time, in debate conducted for its own sake as much as for any conclusion.
Hui Shi, active around 313 BCE, is known almost entirely through ten propositions the Zhuangzi preserves without fully explaining. Among them: the sun at noon is simultaneously declining, a thing dies at the moment it is born, and the greatest thing has nothing outside it while the smallest has nothing inside it. Read together they push at the boundary between how words carve the world into fixed categories and how the world is continuous and changing, an argument later readers connect to Zhuangzi's own skepticism about fixed perspectives.
Gongsun Long, active from about 320 to 250 BCE, built tightly reasoned arguments rather than gnomic sayings. His most famous claim, that a white horse is not a horse, turns on the difference between a name picking out color and shape together, white horse, and a name picking out shape alone, horse. Taken as classes rather than objects, the two names do not share one reference, so the statement that a white horse is a horse conflates two distinct claims. The argument struck contemporaries as sophistry, but it is among the earliest sustained Chinese reasoning about language and reality, and scholarship reads it alongside the later Mohist Canons, whose passages rebut or defend against disputer arguments.
Almost none of the school's own writing survived. The Gongsun Longzi is the only text to come down complete, and the paradoxes attributed to Hui Shi exist only because a rival tradition thought them worth quoting.