John McCarthy, for those not in the know, was one of the most brilliant minds in the field of Computer Science and very much likely to go down in history as a foundational thinker of our era.
Absolutely. Beliefs, wants, and intentions are just different types of fuzzy logic.
Weak AI—image to text, NPC pathfinding, that kind of thing—is all about imprecise "fuzzy" logic. We call it "artificial intelligence" because we don't have the computing power to get a perfect solution. So we get as close as we can.
For example, an expert system for medical diagnosis might "believe" you have a disease with 70% probability.
Or, you might assign a robot to go to 10 locations, each with a different level of "want." If it isn't possible to get to all of them in a given time, it can calculate which path satisfies the greatest "wants."
The field and geniuses behind AI are so often dismissed because they didn't achieve sentience like they promised. But these guys' research is everywhere. Siri, Wolfram Alpha, financial analysis, game opponents, speech recognition, text recognition, data mining, DNA sequencing. The list is endless.