What are the known refutations of Mises' Axiom of Human Action? From Mises' Human Action


  Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.


Are there any criticisms of this axiom as not being a complete description? By complete, I mean not that it describes all aspects of human behavior or fully explores it, rather I am asking whether or not it fully expounds some first cause of human action from which we can deduce answers to other questions about human economic behavior?

This question is not about whether or not the corollaries deduced from this axiom are true, simply: Is this description sufficient to allow us to, from it, describe corollaries of human behavior?
I am asking whether or not it fully expounds some first cause of human
  action from which we can deduce answers to other questions about human
  economic behavior?


What it is getting at:

Praxeology [the science of human action] says that all economic propositions which claim to be true must be shown to be deducible by means of formal logic from the incontestably true material knowledge regarding the meaning of action. Specifically, all economic reasoning consists of the following:


an understanding of the categories of action and the meaning of a change occurring in such things as values, preferences, knowledge, means, costs, etc;
a description of a world in which the categories of action assume concrete meaning, where definite people are identified as actors with definite objects specified as their means of action, with some definite goals identified as values and definite things specified as costs. Such description could be one of a Robinson Crusoe world, or a world with more than one actor in which interpersonal relationships are possible; of a world of barter exchange or of money and exchanges that make use of money as a common medium of exchange; of a world of only land, labor, and time as factors of production, or a world with capital products; of a world with perfectly divisible or indivisible, specific or unspecific factors of production; or of a world with diverse social institutions, treating diverse actions as aggression and threatening them with physical punishment, etc; and
a logical deduction of the consequences which result from the performance of some specified action within this world, or of the consequences which result for a specific actor if this situation is changed in a specified way.


Provided there is no flaw in the process of deduction, the conclusions that such reasoning yield must be valid a priori because their validity would ultimately go back to nothing but the indisputable axiom of action. If the situation and the changes introduced into it are fictional or assumptional (a Robinson Crusoe world, or a world with only indivisible or only completely specific factors of production), then the conclusions are, of course, a priori true only of such a “possible world.” If, on the other hand, the situation and changes can be identified as real, perceived and conceptualized as such by real actors, then the conclusions are a priori true propositions about the world as it really is. [19]

Such is the idea of economics as praxeology. And such then is the ultimate disagreement that Austrians have with their colleagues: Their pronouncements cannot be deduced from the axiom of action or even stand in clear-cut contradiction to propositions that can be deduced from the axiom of action.
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, pg 25.


  What are the known refutations of Mises' Axiom of Human Action?


There aren't any that have been successful... 

"All of these categories which we know to be the very heart of economics—values, ends, means, choice, preference, cost, profit and loss—are implied in the axiom of action. Like the axiom itself, they are not derived from observation. Rather, that one is able to interpret observations in terms of such categories requires that one already knows what it means to act.

No one who is not an actor could ever understand them, as they are not “given,” ready to be observed, but observational experience is cast in these terms as it is construed by an actor. And while they and their interrelations were not obviously implied in the action axiom, once it has been made explicit that they are implied, and how, one no longer has any difficulty recognizing them as being a priori true in the same sense as the axiom itself is.

For any attempt to disprove the validity of what Mises has reconstructed as implied in the very concept of action would have to be aimed at a _goal_, requiring _means_, excluding other courses of action, incurring _costs_, subjecting the actor to the possibility of achieving or not achieving the desired goal and so leading to a _profit_ or a _loss_.

Thus, it is manifestly impossible to ever dispute or falsify the validity of Mises’s insights. In fact, a situation in which the categories of action would cease to have a real existence could itself never be observed or spoken of, since to make an observation and to speak are themselves actions.
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe, ESAM