Yes, there is a famous philosophical puzzle in the philosophy of language and mind that perfectly mirrors this, often discussed under Russell's scope distinctions regarding intentional states and comparative perceptions.

The most famous, classic variant of this specific "Russellianism" comes from a joke recounted by philosopher Bertrand Russell himself in his principles of mathematical logic, which usually goes:

"I knew a touchy yacht-owner to whom a guest said, 'I thought your yacht was larger than it is'; and the owner replied, 'No, my yacht is not larger than it is.'"

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The Logical Anatomy of the Puzzle

When you say "that car looks bigger than it is," you do not mean that the car has a contradictory property (being larger than its own size). Instead, the puzzle is resolved by analyzing the scope of the operators involved (the perception/belief operator vs. the actual size).

In first-order logic inspired by Russell's Theory of Descriptions, the sentence has two completely different interpretations based on scope: [1]

1. Narrow Scope (The Contradictory Reading)

If the actual size of the car is bound inside the appearance or belief, you get an impossibility:

• The Structure: You perceive that [the car's size is greater than the car's size].
• The Result: This claims you are perceiving a logical contradiction (x > x). This is what the touchy yacht owner thought his guest meant.

2. Wide Scope (The Rational Reading)

If the actual size of the car is extracted outside of the perception operator to establish a baseline first, the contradiction disappears:

• The Structure: There is a specific size S that the car actually has, and it looks to you as if the car has a size S' which is greater than S.
• The Result: This is perfectly rational. You are simply comparing a real-world property to a subjective mental representation.

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Why it Matters to Russellianism

This example illustrates a core tenet of Russell's philosophy: grammatical form misleads us about logical form. [1]

Surface grammar lumps "than it is" into the same clause as the perception ("looks..."). Russell’s quantification tools allow us to "unpack" the sentence, proving that the mind is capable of tracking an object's actual properties in the real world while simultaneously holding a distorted mental representation of it.

If you want to dive deeper, I can show you how this is written out in formal logic notation using quantifiers, or we can look at how modern philosophers use this to study perceptual illusions. What sounds more interesting?