I think Hegel’s dialectic is, in Brandomian fashion, a very inferentialist theory of concepts. There’s conspicuous textual evidence that the majority of theoretical claims in the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic, the Encyclopaedia, are about conceptual connections. Conceptual contents are individuated by the connections with the concepts they entail and which entail them. Since theoretical as well as ordinary language expressions can be governed by incoherent inferential links, dialectic has to reshape them (one may see it as 19^th century conceptual engineering). In particular, concepts are shaped by relations of modal incompatibility or exclusion. So Hegel claims in the Science of Logic that the essence of dialectic lies in a certain idea of negation: the ‘quite simple insight’ of ‘the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive’, is all we need to understand dialectic. I propose that what he calls bestimmte Negation, determinate or ‘positive’ negation, is such modal exclusion, out of which blosse Negation, mere negation, i.e., the contradictory-forming operator, is abstracted as the minimal incompatible.