Dr. Ketner's education includes MA (Philosophy) Oklahoma State University, MA (Folklore and Mythology) University of California at Los Angeles, and PhD (Philosophy) University of California at Santa Barbara. He has produced a number of reference works and essays on Peirce, including Reasoning and the Logic of Things (Harvard University Press, 1992), an edition of Peirce's 1898 Cambridge Conferences Lectures. A collection of his correspondence with Walker Percy was published by the University Press of Mississippi (1995) as A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy. With the aid of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he wrote the first volume of his life of Peirce, published in 1998 by Vanderbilt University Press as His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce. He is a Fellow (past president) of the Peirce Society. He was instrumental in organizing the 1976 (Amsterdam) and 1989 (Harvard) international Peirce congresses.

He has served as Institute Director since its founding in 1971 by Charles S. Hardwick. He is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor within the Institute, College of Arts and Sciences, Texas Tech University; he also is Charles Sanders Peirce Interdisciplinary Professor in the Perry School of Nursing in Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.