The counterfactual is "if I had flipped the switch, the lights would be on." That is a situation with changed facts, and therefore counterfactual. The tricky bi

The counterfactual is "if I had flipped the switch, the lights would be on." That is a situation with changed facts, and therefore counterfactual. The tricky bit is the causality. We have to construct an alternate history, with a counterfactual cause and a counterfactual result. And we can't actually know that. Maybe the bulb is burnt out. Maybe there's a power outage just now. Maybe we've blown a fuse. The causality is just conjecture. Now consider the opposite. The lights are off because the bulb burnt out. That's a lot less ambiguous. If you want to doubt the causality you've got to get all mystical.