Why Would Jerry Bring Anything?

Imagine you are in conversation with someone, and find yourself relating some set of facts. I'm talking about the kind of conversation in which you and the person with whom you are speaking are trying to understand or come to know something that one or both you believes to be or not be the case; that is to say, you could, for the purposes of this thought experiment, be talking with anyone about anything. In this dialogue, you and your interlocutor continually show through words, body language, and, I suppose, pheromones that you are or are not on the same page about any number of aspects of the conversation. My question to you comes after the jump:

Further imagine that as you are delivering your description of some events, the person with whom you're talking sometimes tells you, "I'm with you," and also, "I hear you." What do you take these two phrases to mean? For some reason I feel like I've been using them more than usual lately. I want to trace my use of these phrases back to when I worked as a payroll rep and spent a lot of time working through issues with people on the phone. I want also to say that "I hear you" was my stock phrase for a wide range of meanings. Sometimes, it was meant to communicate that the person could continue speaking, and that I registered their intended meaning - an elongated, "uh huh" I guess. Often, I used it to set up some question or rebuttal. As in, "I hear you...what I'm still wondering, though, is...".

I bring this up right now because I was talking with a friend about this, and she told me that if she heard "I hear you" she would take it to imply agreement. And while I think that the phrase does suggest some kind of assent, I think I went to that well again and again precisely because it created that intimacy of shared understanding while at the same time withholding an explicit statement of agreement. Am I, then, being disingenuous if I, nodding and smiling all the while, think that saying "I hear you" commits me to nothing? File this under non-urgent musings, and then, perhaps, let me know what you think.