Unless we first postulate that people deliberately undertake previously planned activities with the goal of making their situations, as they subjectively see them, better than they otherwise would be, there would be no grounds for differentiating the exchange that takes place in human society from the exchange of molecules that occurs between two liquids separated by a permeable membrane. And the features which characterize the members of the class of phenomena singled out as the subject matter of a special science must have an axiomatic status for practitioners of that science, for if they reject them then they also reject the rationale for that science's existence.
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What is notable about economics in this regard is just how much knowledge can be gained by hunting down the implications of its postulates. Carl Menger arrived at the great insight that the value of a good to an actor depends on its marginal utility to him based entirely on pursuing the consequences of the assumption that people act with the purpose of improving their circumstances. Mises's magnum opus, Human Action, is a magnificent display of the results that can be achieved along these lines.
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One can understand and assent to the core truth about economics that Mises stressed, but nevertheless part ways with him over exactly what that truth means to the pursuit of economic science. For example, Mises's protégé F.A. Hayek, while agreeing with his mentor on the a priori nature of the "logic of action" and its foundational status in economics, still came to regard investigating the empirical issues that the logic of action leaves open as a more important undertaking than further examination of that logic itself.
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