Mises and Objectivity (again)

Sorry, apparently, this blog is now just about epistemology?

Anyway, I'm continuing to read Human Action.  Mises spends a lot of time trashing the German historical school, which isn't particularly relevant to the arguments of today since the historicists don't have a lot of contemporary antecedents.  I absolutely loved his evisceration of homo economicus and the assumptions of the mainstream economic interpretation of classical economics.  Nothing I hadn't heard, but well put.

My sticking point continues to be with Mises' episetmological framework.  I appreciate that Human Action proceeds as it should--by starting from a philosophy of science framework and working downward to social theory.  But Mises' arguments for the "objectivity" of praxeology are still either unconvincing or too confusing for me to understand.  The comparison made in the study guide was that the Pythagorean theorem doesn't not need to be proven by measuring X number of triangles and concluding a posteriori that Pythagoras was correct.  Similarly, praxeological statements about human action and economic laws are not subject to falsification a posteriori.  They, like mathematical laws, derive their objective and universal truth from deductive logic (which Mises discusses as imperfect though good enough when subject to critical scrutiny) leading from humans act all the way to the laws of economics.

My question though is that how are economic laws equivalent to mathematical laws?  How does a relationship between abstract quantities in math, a pure science, actually relate to economic laws which are necessarily bound to human experience.  I'm not saying that a priori ideas cannot exist, but that the idea that these are universal for all individuals may not be true.  Triangles do not act.  Humans act.  The necessarily subjective character of that action (which is the precis of Mises' school of economic thought) seems like it should make those two branches of scientific inquiry quite dissimilar.  Furthermore, while a mathematician may be influenced by existing categorizations and understandings of how triangles behave, the degree to which individuals are influenced culturally about economic matters is in my estimation much greater.  I don't receive much information in my development on how to calculate the area of triangles.  Hell, I receive more information daily about economic matters than I have probably about triangles.  I can get the ideal of wanting economic laws to be as true as mathemetical laws, but it seems damn near impossible since our perception of economic logic and reason is culturally determined.  There would have to be too many damn asterisks after your knowledge claims.

It brings me back to something Mary Katherine once told me: "But it's still rat choice" [meaning rational choice].  I was trying to explain Austrian subjectivity theory to her, but it just all came out as rational choice.  Every time I read Mises I feel the same way.  He goes through a great critique of rational choice's idiotic assumptions about human nature, but then seeks to create the same universal, timeless, context-less laws that rational choice desires.  Weird.